It's pretty terrible that some academic can take public money to fund his research, then take out a patent on the result and prevent his financiers from using an 'invention'.
Actually, the most stupid part about the whole thing it is that the government gets some rights to use these publicly-funded patented inventions. (As if the government, not the taxpayer funded it)
The short explanation goes like this: before Bayh-Dole patent rights were indeed with the federal government, but the Government did a rather poor job of turning the accumulated IP into money. Bayh-Dole was passed in the late Seventies, during the Carter-Reagan recession, and the idea was that the patents should now lie with researchers and universities because they would have a better idea how to exploit them, and it was unsaid that with this alternative funding channel open federal research expenditures could be reduced.
The long version is that it is really complicated. A whole new ecosystem has grown up around this environment, and the patent system as is is very suitable for actual commercial processes but not at all for basic methods used in processes.
Also: Stanford v. Roche
I'm not saying that this is the best environment, but it is the environment that we have, and these arguments are not outrageous. Besides, this is the environment that biotech startup are coming from, and top universities are making big dollars from royalties. That's why I said that it's really complicated.
All grants are allowed to charge indirect costs to the grant fund. These indirect costs are used to cover the cost of facilities, maintenance and all the little bits that no one ever thinks about. No one buys a piece of equipment expecting there to be no maintenance whatsoever. These indirect costs are always governed by an agreed-upon rate set between the host institution and the funding entity. The federal government in particular has very clearly spelled out rules regarding this. For example - the grant that funds my work right now has a very clearly legislated indirect cost rate of 8%. If our indirect costs exceed that 8% monthly, we can lose our funding.
Now where we get into the part where you're not 100% accurate, and I believe being a bit inflammatory is the triple dipping. Institutions can get a grant to purchase equipment, and then charge the same grant for the use of the equipment. The institution can charge for the personnel hours that run the equipment on related projects, they can charge that indirect cost that we discussed earlier, but that's about it. It's not as if they can just make up a number and charge the government that much to use the equipment for related projects. There are circulars from the Office of Management and Budget that dictate what you can and can't do with your money - for example, colleges and universities have to adhere to the cost principles outlined in OMB A-21, available here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars_a021_2004 if you want some light reading.
On top of the basic OMB circulars, all federal grants have additional legislation that add further stipulations to how money can be spent, but come from any number of 1000 sources, so I'm not going to cite them. Anyway, the institution cannot just charge the government for use of the equipment.
Secondly - they are not paid 'overhead' for making the equipment available. They are paid an indirect cost rate to maintain, store and generally keep the facility running for grants. This rate is very clearly spelled out in any grant documents. I've not seen 60+% in any grant I've ever worked with. In smaller institutions they tend to be around 10-20%. On the larger campuses, the average indirect rate was 32%.
Anyone familiar with the finances know that there are legislation and regulation in place to dictate all of this, and while it may be convoluted, it's really not as predatory as you make it out to be.
I run a company that has won many Federal grants and subcontracted a lot of work to universities in the Boston and Cambridge area.
Let's look at the current indirect rates for universities I've worked with:
1) Harvard: up to 69.5% for Federally funded research [1]
2) MIT: currently 56%, but in 2010, it was 68% [2]
3) Boston University: 63.7% [3]
4) Northeastern University: 54.5% [4]
60% as an average is much closer to what I see than 32%. The Boston Globe says the national average is 52% [5].
P.S. On a tip from a friend, I'll add that MGH's indirect rate is 74% [6]
[1] http://osp.fad.harvard.edu/content/fa-cost-rates-federal-spo...
[2] http://osp.mit.edu/rates/facilities-and-administrative-fa-ra...
[3] http://www.bu.edu/osp/files/2012/03/RateAgreement22Feb2013.p...
[4] http://www.northeastern.edu/research/raf/files/Indirect-Cost...
[5] http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-thw...
[6] http://resadmin.partners.org/RM_Home/Documents/2011%2005%200...
You don't know that for sure. On the other other hand we do know things, like without the open source ethic Wikipedia wouldn't exist.
An example: Pfizer closed down their Lansing michigan plant and wanted to force their employees to relocate to San Diego, without doing a real analysis of the decision, and on the eve of the move came to find out that the one person running their fermenter culture system didn't want to move - he wanted to raise his daughters on a farm and San Diego was too expensive for his pay grade. So they lost the ability to basically do every bioassay that they were doing in Lansing. Three years later, I had the opportunity to work next to the massive san diego pfizer campus. The facility was 2/3 empty and pfizer was struggling to find extra tenants and toying with a 'bio-incubator' idea.
So, a few things:
1. this testing environment would not fly today, as it should not have then. Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical.
2. polio was the most dreaded disease in America, for many reasons. More people contributed to the development of a treatment--through the March of Dimes--than for any other disease up to that time. Even though the vaccine was feared and widely known, the mass tests were fiercely opposed by some. When the positive results of the test were announced, the nation treated the news much like the end of a war with exultation, presidential awards, and ticker-tape parades.
3. the polio vaccine was relatively safe and straightforward, as killed vaccines generally are. The killed vaccine was first tested in culture to make sure it was dead. Unlike many other pharmaceuticals, where the effectiveness even after a test can be murky and side-effects abound, a killed vaccine is relatively easy to understand. Testing a drug that may lessen the impact of a particular type of cancer is considerably harder, both in itself and because of today's protective regulations.
4. the polio vaccine was developed by a very small team run by a zealot. The resources required were considerably less than the resources required to develop other drugs. Look at the development of the sulfa drugs for a counter-example: Bayer delayed their widespread release even after they had concluded they were effective and patented them because they wanted to make sure their patent was valid (source: "The Demon Under the Microscope", by Hager.) Bayer had spent a lot of time and money developing the drugs and wanted to make sure they got a return. (Ironically, it was quickly realized that the patented sulfa drugs were in fact a combination of active and inactive parts and the active parts could not be patented; and soon after penicillin was introduced, sidelining the sulfa drugs. It's a fascinating story, well worth the read.)
Source for info about Salk: the excellent "Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio" by Kluger.
Also your objection "Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical." is nonsense. Polio is a fundamentally childhood disease. Not developing a drug that saves children (but not adults) because children cannot give 'informed consent' is unethical, too. If you think there aren't childhood diseases that we are trying to cure in the contemporary era, you are crazy.
What I meant--but articulated poorly--was that the children selected for the tests were from a school for the differently abled because they were, at the time, seen as less valuable. That idea is no longer acceptable.
You, as the final stage of your research, using government money.
Say you do get something. Now you want the government to also be involved in the commercialization of the discovery? I think people would argue they are already involved enough, what with the FDA and all.
Further: the person making the discovery spent half a decade of their lives after college to get a PhD, and very likely many years of post-doc, to be extremely specialized in an extremely narrow area of some field. Now you want them to be product managers and manufacturers and businessmen as well?
This is one problem patents solve: Division of labor. Let those who are good at science and technology do their thing, and let people who are good at commercializing do their thing, and let IP ensure one both sides have means to reap appropriate rewards.
I wonder if the US government could offer free licensing to all national companies, which would seem to be the best of both worlds?
(Note: I'm not a US citizen, I'm British. s/US/UK/ and the basic result is the same...)
Here's another complication. Often, faculty need multiple sources of funding over the years to support their research, including federal grants, university support (direct through money or indirect through facilities and staff), and industrial support through gifts and grants. As well, the intellectual heavy-lifting is done by the faculty and their students.
If you believe in intellectual property rights, then who of all of these stakeholders deserves ownership of those rights?
Personally, I lean against faculty patenting their inventions. I'd rather the IP is open to the public. Even if a faculty member wants to commercialize their research, I think they are better off competing in the marketplace rather than through IP arsenals.
But, I understand the other point of view. Patent licensing is a lucrative source of revenue for universities (e.g., UFL and its Gatorade revenue) and inventors. As well, it's at least uncomfortable and perhaps unfair if opportunistic companies were able to commercialize on a faculty member's invention without renumeration or attribution.
Complicated topic.
You need to realize that IP is an artificial monopoly granted by the govt for a purpose.
You need to realize that people can know what IP is and still disagree with you.
If one knows the concept of IP but not why it's needed in these situations, one is still arguing from a position of incomplete understanding.
Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.
And why is that a bad thing? If they have an idea that they think they can make a lot of money by patenting, they're going to do that research anyway with non-government funding (e.g., start a company and raise venture capital). So why waste taxpayer money funding it? Better for the government to fund something like basic scientific research that's not patentable (and on which applied research depends).
The issue with panels allocating taxpayer money, is that their interest is still in government. That is, they will fund research in which government has an interest or is neutral, and consequently, any research which is potentially harmful to government is scrapped (even if it would be beneficial to the taxpayer.)
One might not think there's a distinction between what benefits the government and what benefits the taxpayer if one believes in the fairy tale that governments exist to benefit the people.
Really? Am I really reading this?
Were the panels doing their duty when they awarded Felisa Wolfe-Simon her grant? Was the panel doing their duty when Leo Paquette, sitting on one, kaiboshed a young researcher's grant and stole the idea for himself? How about the panel that awarded a grant to Geoffrey Chang, in spite of having six retractions due to careless (and quite frankly stupid) crystallography? Is he really "someone who deserves it the most"? This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could list about 20 more off the top of my head.
I would go so far as to say as a rule they do not allocate scarce funds to whomever deserves them the most.
Government is actually incredibly bad at funding risky research because in the end it is accountable and needs to show some level of result. Even the moonshot had concrete goals and mileposts that needed to be met or else the whole thing was called off.
Meanwhile, there's this crazy guy who discovered something incredibly risky that many of his peers didn't believe was true and did it outside of the government:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell*
I never said "all important discoveries come from the government". The Polio vaccine and penicillin and the theory of evolution and the last Nobel Prize for Graphene and a bunch of other things came out of non-government funded research.
That has no bearing on the fact that most of the biggest advances cannot be had without significant long term investment without guaranteed outcomes that most private investors are extremely unlikely to fund. I mean, have you seen the sort of research proposals professors write that actually get grants from the NSF?
Beyond things like DARPA and NSF and the like, think of things like the various National Labs. Nobody's winning Nobel Prizes every year at these labs, but year after year they do work that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge to enable future discoveries.
Yes, I have seen some of the shit that professors write for the NSF, and I'd rather they not be using taxpayer money to fund their intellectual masturbations, or hiking trips to the rainforest, or scuba diving expeditions (among other travesties).
I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them.
What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.
As a well-known example, John Pople wrote a program called Gaussian while at Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon licensed the program to Gaussian Inc. When John Pople moved to Northwestern, he was banned from using the program he wrote, as was all of Northwestern University. Before the passage of Bayh-Dole, Gaussian was given out for free by Carnegie Mellon. Once Bayh-Dole gave them clear rights in the code, everything changed.
Wouldn't that mean that researchers would be less motivated ?
The hammer was invented in spite of the fact it was impossible to control the proliferation of its design.
Many researchers aren't businessmen, the simply want to scratch an itch, and not want to work tedious day jobs. If they can make a living while doing something they enjoy, all is great.
Except that very rarely does wanting to scratch an itch coincide with obtaining funds to do so. As a result, the researcher needs to make concessions to his own research goals, or the quality of it, in order to convince people who don't understand it that it has some value, in order to finance it. If not, they're gonna be stuck researching something they have little or no interest in, or back to the day job. This is the real motivation killer.