Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion patents and college

Watched a couple of programs and was curious where colleges were going with patents. And it is really interesting with a law called Bayh-Dole that allowed colleges to go after patents in a commercial sense and on a global basis this is really a race.

So you have colleges that get the best and the brightest and then they develop unique scientific breakthroughs and make money on patents. Especially graphene.

Which takes the college from being this school like place of learning into a think tank factory. It becomes a have and have not situation that could really affect the 2nd tier schools in 20 years.

Hi Wren,

This is a topic of daily for concern for me at work. You are right to be concerned. While it is great for universities and professors to get their fair share of the pie that comes from a new, patentable invention, you had better believe there are some serious unintended consequences rapidly developing.

To begin with - research funding is skewed toward research with more a obvious path to financial reward. But of course the most exciting discoveries and inventions don't always (or even usually) come out of those obvious pathways. Especially when researchers on the obvious pathways are rushing to get results so they can get patents so everybody can get some more pie. And this generally degrades passion and freedom to explore. Instead it turns universities into business endeavors cracking the whip over their most fruitful obvious pathways.

And - the best and brightest will channel into those obvious pathways. They'll either go there looking for pie themselves, or be shuttled there by people looking to get more pie when the best and the brightest get patents.

So the best and the brightest won't be as likely to follow that passion they always had for understanding the biochemistry of deep sea hydrothermal vents or the impact of radiation on hybrid tea roses or whatever wild and imaginative thing has sparked their beautiful minds. And the spark, ignited by passion and freedom to explore, are what drives the sideways discoveries that have elevated science and technology, I think.

I could go on and on. But suffice to say that the romantic notion of the solitary scientist working alone at night on an obscure project - and stumbling upon a brilliant new idea - is fading fast.

There will be precious little stumbling upon in our future, if things continue as they are. We'll get lots of improvements and refinements to existing stuff. But those sideways, serendipitous leaps are going to become scarce. But hey - there's always Kickstarter! Maybe innovation and invention will go there.

Just me on my soap box, but I do care about this a lot,
Sue
P.S.
I don't mean that the universities are doing this nefariously. In fact, they probably have to in order to survive the "race" as you so astutely put it.

Let me add my particular concerns here-- this is a rapidly developing situation which is turning basic-research-factories (universities) into a more-- well, "corporate" model, I suppose.

Complete with non-disclosure and need-to-know being front and center, which kills ad hoc collaboration and open sharing of preliminary research and hypotheses.

What has made universities such great incubators of basic (as opposed to applied) research (though, of course this is the jetstream that applied research and patentable discoveries rides upon) is that openness.

If you're concerned about getting scooped, you're more likely to keep your mouth shut-- ESPECIALLY among people who are likely competitors.

The problem is that science is not (and really-- has never been) mostly conducted in a vacuum that way. Your in-field competitors are the ones most likely to be able to elevate your nascent idea into something truly great.

But this unseemly scrabbling for intellectual property is just-- killing that.

Publish first, yes, that has been a thing for a while, and everyone in science has seen firsthand how some things get ignored in favor of stuff which is largely "captain obvious" material, but eminently publication-worthy. Or how researchers fail to seek expert input that they probably could really use, but won't get because they are small fish, and giving a whiff of what you're up to to one of the BIG fish (well-funded labs that have armies of post-docs running a well-oiled, 24-7 science machine like the Borg)... you're going to get scooped before your two undergraduates have a chance to spend the next year on it.

The patent thing is accelerating a lot of trends that pushing publications so hard had already been doing.



Ultimately, we should probably all be quite concerned about what will happen when nobody is much interested in doing long-shot basic research anymore. And that day is very definitely coming.

It's already the case in pharma research. It's all about the intellectual property, and cost-profit ratios now. Marginal discoveries that are really transformations of extant intellectual property are the name of the game.

There are some areas of basic research that are going begging because they are too long a shot for corporate pharma to fund, and now universities and granting agencies don't want those projects either. So who is going to fund research that yields new classes of antibiotics, hmm?