On December 10, 1980, the Times published an article entitled “Harvard University, Inc.?”. It reported that Harvard was in the midst of a serious controversy among its leading faculty members regarding the university’s equity-partnership with a private company. Shortly before this exposé, Derek Bok, the president of the university at that time, announced a plan to invest part of its endowment in a newly launched bio-tech company. The Times was alarmed that this prestigious edifice of academia, which had received millions of dollars in public funds from the government, was turning its research results into a monetary engagement. Seeing this as a symbolic revelation, the House of Representatives organised a subcommittee in 1981 to investigate the ethical and institutional impacts of commercialising university biomedical research. Harvard was not unique in its actions. From the late 1970s, particularly in the life sciences, researchers had become more and more interested in filing patents for their discoveries and even went so far as to establish their own startups. What triggered this change were fundamental discoveries and innovations in biotechnology that followed in succession. Further, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 officially allowed universities to retain title to intellectual property resulting from federally funded research performed in their laboratories. This law not only enabled universities to secure promising royalty agreements but also strongly encouraged them to license their patents to small business enterprises. It aimed to foster startup endeavours through the transfer of innovation seeds planted in universities to the private sector. A remarkable example was Genentech, which was established in 1976 as a partnership between Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, a famous venture capitalist. What we see here is the traditional demarcation between “public” and “private” science jeopardised by double meanings. On the one hand, by directly encountering market activity, academic pursuits as a public good was trapped by the hope of private gain through commercial sponsorship. But on the other hand, granting private intellectual property status to living organisms or DNA sequences became a 20th Century “enclosure” of natural resources, which should be freely available in the public domain. Given these contradictions, in this paper I would like to explore several topics, including the discussions that the presidents and research directors of elite universities revealed in the House of Representatives, the Recombinant DNA controversy at the Asilomar Conference, the molecular biologists’ entrepreneurial commitments to private companies, and a comparison of patent policies between Stanford and UC Berkeley. In so doing I will examine the complexities and ambiguities that US academia had to confront in the 70s and 80s.