By Teresa A. Martin
When I’m out and about somewhere and people are chatting about a topic as it were an old friend and I’m clueless ... well, that’s sure sign research girl is going to swing into action. And that’s what happened this week.
When I was up at the Innovation Summit at MIT earlier this month, I kept hearing cozy reference to “buy-dough” Well, thank goodness for a little Google parsing because in a fit of obsession this week I was able to determine that the friend in common reference was the Bayh-Dole act of 1980 and it was a key event in changing the way universities can transfer research into the commercial area.
Technology transfer means “the transfer of research results from university to the commercial marketplace for the public benefit.” It isn’t just about profit – the idea of public benefit is part of the equation and one that has led to some interesting debates, including whether the pharmaceutical industry should have controls on its pricing when core research originated with federal dollars in a university lab.
As early as the 1920s, commercialization was happening, but the movement’s real push came in 1945 with a presidential report called “Science, The Endless Frontier.” In the midst of World War 2, few could argue that moving research into production was vial for national defense ... but Vannevar Bush’s paper also articulated the value of research and basic science to economic development.
The report, in turn, let to increased federal research funding and helped inspire the creation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
As dollars flowed, research increased, and the US government owned the results. Well, mostly. There was a mish-mash of rules and regulations that varied agency to agency. About the only thing that was clear was that Universities could take the money and do the research, but they didn’t have an predicable rights to the do anything with the results, even if they wanted to. For all practical purposes, technology couldn’t be transferred.
In fact, prior to Bayh-Dole, fewer than 250 patents were issued to universities per year. The federal government, by contrast, had approximately 30,000 patents, but a mere five percent of those led to products ... which isn’t surprising since the government isn’t in the business of product development and product sales and didn’t have the resources to turn patents to profit.
No one was happy with the situation. The goal of the act was to encourage universities to participate in technology transfer activities. By removing the confusion and barrier of ownership and explicitly encouraging the filing of patents and commercialization of technology, research dollars should turn into economic dollars.
In other words, Bayh-Dole gave universities (and non-profits) control of their inventions, even if the US government funded the research. The legislation was sponsored by Senators Birch Bayh of Indiana and Robert Dole of Kansas. It was enacted by the US Congress on December 12, 1980.
And it worked. It changed the whole dynamics: Last year at MIT alone there were 121 new us patents, 97 new tech licenses, and 23 new startup companies – a “pretty standard tech transfer year” at MIT according to university president Susan Hockfield,
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the cultural gap between pure science and filthy lucre was bridged. Or every university suddenly did not into a marketing machine. The struggle how to move research to market is still very much an issue – but at least the ownership impediment was removed.
And so we have ophthalmic drops used for glaucoma (University of Florida), crystal-based 'nanovessels' for fuel cells (University of Michigan), a veterinary method for "treating inappropriate elimination of urine in household pets" (Tufts University), active optical antennas (Harvard University), electrodes for bioremediation and recovery of heavy metals in groundwater (UMASS) ...
The list goes on and there are thousands upon thousands of others, as varied as the human mind and as creative as the human spirit, all trying to find the balance between science, technology, and the world of commerce. It is a beautiful and delicate balance, that is a constant challenge and constant work in progress, and a mere hint of the potential that lies within our species.
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