Prusoff's statements were the last straw. On March 15, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it would not enforce its patent license on d4T in South Africa. In a statement, executive vice president John McGoldrick said: "This is not about profits and patents; it's about poverty and a devastating disease. We seek no profits on AIDS drugs in Africa, and we will not let our patents be an obstacle." Though a BMS spokesperson would later tell the Wall Street Journal that the student protests did not compel the decision-making process, the mere timing of events suggests they did.

Kapczynski says a professor, whom she would not name, told her that the public comments made by Prusoff had embarrassed the university. "They were distraught by the editorial he wrote and how publicly he was willing to talk," she recalls. "They had a lot to fear. Drug companies are very reluctant to discuss patents. They're a big funder of university research, and maintaining good relations is important. The universities don't want to be difficult to work with for the pharmaceutical companies because they want to market their compounds to them."

Considering these factors, the speed with which the university moved astonished Kapczynski. "I didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it did. It was bewildering, and still sounds a little too good to be true," she says, "Still, they were thinking about a price cut anyway, so it made sense. They're trying to save their public image. And I imagine a student movement was on the radar for them. People have been organizing to encourage universities to divest themselves of pharmaceutical interests in student groups and on e-mail lists. Students are becoming strategic in organizing around issues in which their universities are involved."

The Yale battle is just one of several in what has become an international campaign to force universities and pharmaceuticals to change their business practices in dealing with the AIDS pandemic. A similar effort is now underway at the University of Minnesota, which holds the patent for Abacavir, sold under the brand name Ziagen and exclusively licensed to pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome. Carbovir, one of the main compounds found in Abacavir, was first synthesized by Robert Vince, a professor of medicinal chemistry, in the late 1970s. The university sued Glaxo Wellcome for patent infringement in 1998; the case was settled, and Glaxo Wellcome agreed to a one-time settlement of $7.25 million in 1999. The university expects royalties on the patent to exceed $300 million, which it wants to reinvest in AIDS research.

In March, as the debate over university patents convulsed Yale, University of Minnesota doctoral student Amanda Swarr started a campaign on the Minnesota campus, calling for it to ease its Abacavir patent. Like Kapczynski, the 28-year-old Swarr is a veteran of AIDS activism. She spent a year and a half in South Africa working on her doctoral thesis in women's studies and volunteering as a member of the global Treatment Action Campaign.

"Students here are feeling like there's a local connection," Swarr says, explaining why she has been successful in mobilizing against the university. The issue, she says, goes beyond AIDS drugs and pharmaceutical companies. "We're dissatisfied with the corporatization of the university. Corporations are giving universities more money than they ever have, and yet undergraduate education is deteriorating and students face tuition hikes on campuses."

But pharmaceuticals, in particular, have drawn the anger of students -- and other critics. The novelist and journalist John le Carré took shots at Big Pharm in his latest book, "The Constant Gardener," and blasted the relationship between universities and the pharmaceutical industry in a recent essay in the Nation. "Consider what happens to supposedly impartial academic medical research," le Carré wrote, "when giant pharmaceutical companies donate whole biotech buildings and endow professorships at the universities and teaching hospitals where their products are tested and developed. There has been a steady flow of alarming cases in recent years where inconvenient scientific findings have been suppressed or rewritten, and those responsible for them hounded off their campuses with their professional and personal reputations systematically trashed by the machinations of public relations agencies in the pay of the pharmas."

On April 16, Swarr and members of the student-run Coalition for Access to Education, which opposes what they charge are the university's sweetheart deals with corporations, sent a letter to officials demanding that the university make a binding statement that it will not enforce its patent in developing nations. Nongovernmental organizations like HealthGAP, South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign and Oxfam America also sent letters of support, asking the university to heed the students' demand. The university issued a statement on April 19 saying that it would "welcome a price reduction" in Ziagen. Though the statement offered praise for Yale's decision not to enforce its patent in South Africa, it did not offer to do so itself. In an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the university's lawyer, Mark Rotenberg, said: "We don't believe that giving up our royalty ... is going to have much of a public health impact."

Swarr, who is heading a petition campaign that she hopes will garner 20,000 signatures, advances the same legal argument used by DWB and Kapczynski, saying "Glaxo Wellcome's high pricing keeps the university from fulfilling its mission of serving the public interest." She believes the university will ultimately relent and pressure Glaxo Wellcome to abandon enforcement of the university's patent. "I think they feel like they need to move on it. They're getting national and international attention on the issue. Abandoning enforcement of the patent would be win-win for the university, too, because it gets almost no royalties from the sale of Ziagen in developing nations."

Others are less sanguine. Jamie Love of the Consumer Project on Technology, who has done extensive research on patent holdings for the most crucial drugs used in AIDS treatment, says there are multiple patent claims on Ziagen, held by both the university and Glaxo Wellcome, that will be extraordinarily difficult to untangle. He points out that there's also bad blood between the university and the corporation over the 1998 lawsuit.

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