In Need of an Ethic and Legal Framework to Secure International Cooperation

A relevant feature of globalization has been the remarkable evolution in universities particularly in science and research. They are now seen not only as creators of knowledge and sources of learning and education but also as drivers of innovation. Universities are international by nature and the scale of their activities and investments and the free flow of individuals are increasing rather than declining as exemplified by work on the human genome, climate change, infectious diseases, particle colliders, large data sets and many other fields. Science that comes from curiositydriven research needs to be protected because it is the life-blood of new initiatives and business opportunities, and it fosters a rich source of the skills required to translate new knowledge into practice. Returns of commercialisation, though substantial, may not reach the size of golden eggs that are expected to solve the financial problems of a modern university. The revenue from MIT’s intellectual property amounted to about 5% of its research budget in 2007. At Cambridge in the UK, the University and its Colleges, Press and Assessment employ 11,700 people, support 77,000 jobs and have a direct expenditure of nearly £1bn. With a substantial venture capital scene there has been a steady growth in the flow of knowledge into industry not only locally but also nationally and internationally (152 invention disclosures, 58 patents filed, 61 licences granted, 28 new start-up companies, 82 consultancy contracts, and 4 spin-out companies created annually). Features such as these serve to emphasise the importance of legal and ethical considerations for, as Pope John Paul II argued, ‘the pre-eminence of the profit motive in conducting scientific research ultimately means that science is deprived of its epistemological character, according to which its primary goal is discovery of the truth. The risk is that when research takes a utilitarian turn, its speculative dimension, which is the inner dynamic of man’s intellectual journey, will be diminished or stifled’.