Sir

Your News story “Venture capital concerns academics” (Nature 413, 95; 2001), on the involvement of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) with the Burrill venture fund, suggests a plan hatched by investors and university officials to exploit our faculty without our consent.

The conflicts for faculty and students resulting from university–industry collaborations have been well documented in, for example, The Business–Higher Education Forum's Working Together, Creating Knowledge: The University–Industry Research Collaboration Initiative (American Council on Education, Washington; 2001. http://www.acenet.edu/bookstore/index.cfm?pubID=230). It would be a pity if articles such as your News story derailed the recent improvements in relations between universities and industries by artificially setting academic scientists against those marketing their discoveries.

The lofty 'bench-to-bedside' goal we aspire to requires that scientists facilitate the transfer of their ideas into the commercial world. At UCSF we scientists, of our own volition, submit about 150 disclosures a year to our Office of Technology. Far too few of these disclosures result in useful products. A committee I chaired identified several contributing factors, including lack of funding for proof-of-principle research and for intellectual-property costs, lack of business acumen among our faculty, and cumbersome procedures. To speed up the process, we developed a non-restrictive agreement with Burrill that we hope will unclog the pipeline with no loss of faculty autonomy or of Burrill's autonomy to set up similar agreements with others.

The agreement introduced no significant changes in the way UCSF operates and required no faculty input. Nonetheless, as a public institution we are especially sensitive to public perception, and so our proposal was offered for comment to several advisory groups, including the Academic Senate, the official voice of the UCSF faculty. Some members of the senate felt that two months was not sufficient time to identify any potential conflicts of interest. It was their dissatisfaction that was reported in your News story. (And as this correspondence goes to press, the proposal seems increasingly unlikely to come to fruition).

You have nicely illustrated a real conflict of interest in industry–academic interactions. Industry needs a hierarchical structure that allows rapid decisions. Universities have a diffuse decision-making structure that can be slowed to glacial speeds because of lack of faculty time and diversity of opinion. If university research is truly to benefit society we need to find ways to accommodate faculty decision-making processes to the honest needs of our industrial counterparts.