By SIMON COLLINS
Soaring commercial funding of research at Auckland University has overtaken Government grants for the first time.
Unaudited figures made available to the Herald show the university's commercial research income more than doubled from $19.8 million in 1997 to $43.3 million last year.
Research grants from the Government, the Royal Society and non-profit foundations have grown, but to $41.3 million.
The shift means the university is more dependent on commercial research income than most of the world's leading research-based universities. However, some of its smaller NZ rivals report even higher ratios of commercial research funding.
"For our research to survive, we have to do commercial work. We can't get round it," said Auckland's deputy vice-chancellor (research), Professor Tom Barnes.
But he said most of the commercial successes that had come out of the university, such as its computer model of the human heart, originated from non-commercial research.
The driving force on both sides of the university's research funding is its medical school, which accounted for 59 per cent of public funding and 57 per cent of commercial funding last year. The school's commercial funds jumped from $10.8 million to $24.5 million in the past four years.
The major private funders are multinational pharmaceutical companies, which paid the university $10.8 million for research last year.
The top private spenders were France's Servier Laboratories and US companies Warner Lambert, Bristol Meyers Squibb and Pharmacia and Upjohn.
Total university funding from foreign sources was $12.3 million.
However, the "commercial" research figure also includes contracts with Government agencies such as Pharmac and the ministries of Education and Health. University educationalists earned $4.5 million from contracts such as designing training courses for principals and for handling children with learning disabilities.
Surprisingly Otago University, though it has fewer students than Auckland, received more total research funding: $89.8 million, compared with Auckland's $84.6 million.
It received more from the Health Research Council ($19 million, Auckland $13.8 million), and about the same from other Government sources and charitable foundations such as the Cancer Society and the National Heart Foundation.
Its deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Ian Smith, said Otago also received between $5 million and $7 million from overseas sources, including the National Institutes of Health in the United States, Britain's Medical Research Council and Japan's Frontiers of Science.
Last year's figures for Massey University are not yet available, but in 2000 it received only $7 million in research funding from all Government grants and charities, and $31 million from "commercial" contracts.
Waikato University's total research income dropped slightly from $16.6 million in 2000 to $16.1 million, mainly because of a drop in overseas income from $2.9 million to just under $1 million.
Waikato's total "commercial" income of $8.3 million exceeded its Government and charitable grants of $7.9 million. But three-quarters of the "commercial" income was from Government departments.
Victoria University's commercial income was only $1.5 million, compared with Government and charitable grants of $8.7 million.
The Tertiary Education Advisory Commission recommended in November that a new system of "performance-based funding" should be introduced for the research component of bulk funding.
The commission proposed that performance should be measured by each university's ability to attract external research funding, its numbers of postgraduate students and the number of times its academics' publications are cited in other published works.
The universities have calculated that the formula would reinforce the dominance of Otago and Auckland.
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