Universities once opposed patents for any academic research. Yale University's 1948 policy on patents stated, "It is, in general, undesirable and contrary to the best interests of medicine and the public to patent any discovery or invention applicable in the fields of public health or medicine." That policy was later abandoned and Yale now holds a key anti-AIDS drug patent jointly with Bristol Myers. Facing massive global protest, Yale last year agreed to relax its patent rules, but the fact that universities routinely now balance who will live and die against their own profit motive is a degradation of their public purpose.
This corruption of academic science is pervasive and the costs are extremely clear, but what is remarkable is how easy it would be to end. Federal and state governments still supply the overwhelming percentage of university research funding. If all such funding was conditioned on ending non-disclosure agreements and on barring the licensing of government-funded results to private industry, the public would benefit both scientifically and financially. We've paid for the knowledge once. We shouldn't have to do so again in increased costs of medicine and increased deaths due to suppressed knowledge.