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The problem with patents
Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 8:59 pm
by gwildperson
There needs to be a reasonable balance between the interests of a patent holder and the interests of science.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-h ... 799.column
Re: The problem with patents
Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 7:56 am
by susato
Interesting article! Yet it's not just investor-funded research that generates lucrative patents. The
Stanford-Boyer patent on recombinant DNA technology brought Stanford and UCSF around $200 million between 1980 and 1997. However, it was licensed non-exclusively, that is, to all companies needing it.
There's an interesting summary [url=
http://eubios.info/BHGP/BHGP14.htm]here[url] of current issues in biotech patents that you may find useful. The sections on Amgen's "obesity gene" and on expressed sequence tags are startling! I am surprised that the Federal funding agencies which underwrite so much university research don't seem to exercise any oversight over the fate of intellectual property resulting from the grants they fund. (The PG researchers can correct me on this) Over the past couple of years NIH has insisted that scientific papers based on NIH funded research be deposited in PubMed so that the general public can read them. Why not stipulate that patents arising from such research be licensed non-exclusively and with generous exemptions for use of the patented technology for research?