Christina's LIS Rant

This post serves a few purposes.  First, Bill Hooker questioned Crotty's assertion about the importance of patents to university researchers [*]. Bill also posted a nice summary of AUTM's statistics (later in DrugMonkey's comment stream there were other discussions of biotech spinoffs).  There are certainly some patents that could make you obscenely wealthy, but these are not all that common (1:2000? 1:10,000?) and I think the consensus is that most tech transfer offices break even (or slightly better), but do not provide massive revenue streams for their universities.  So why do universities have tech transfer offices?  The first reason is that universities have a social obligation - in particular if they are publicly funded and land-grant institutions - to serve the community.  Universities create the knowledge that can make the world a better place, but they themselves can't go into vaccine production or widget production.  Even after something is patented, it will take some support from the scientist or engineer, and possibly a lot of work to actually get it into production - particularly if it's a highly regulated industry. Why would companies spend all of that money and take that risk if they didn't have first mover advantage?  So universities must patent so that they can get companies to take these ideas, invest in them to get them into actual products, and actually make them available for society to make the world a better place. Second, it's a matter of prestige for the university. They are competing for research funding, employees, and students, so this is one way to prove that they're doing cutting edge work.  Third, even through you can publish to prevent other people from patenting, the safest way to make sure you can continue to use a technology is to protect it with a patent, and then not to prevent any future work in any licenses.

The second idea is that I'm all into STS - but I think theories and studies that neglect the structural issues of society and the lab's place in the world miss really important factors.

Third idea is that I need to integrate ideas from STS better - in particular since I don't have any practice questions for sts AT ALL and this is a major area for me. (BTW - do you or someone you know have an MS/MA or PhD in Science Studies, Philosophy of Science,  Science and Technology studies? If so, could you forward me any essay exam questions I could use for practice?  All of the websites for the programs say "they're available at the office or from your advisor" so I would be eternally grateful)

This article is on my comps reading list and is apparently where I got some of the ideas I spouted above and on Bill's blog and friendfeed posts:
Kleinman, D. L.(1998). Untangling Context: Understanding a University Laboratory in the Commercial World. Science, Technology, & Human Values 23(3), 285-314. [**]
Kleinman argues that the approaches used in actor-network theory and social worlds emphasize agency to the exclusion of social structural constraints on actors.  These ignored constraints include those imposed by institutions and the distribution of resources.  These methods also basically start at time 0, with the actors co-constructing everything - but we know that there existing stable attributes of the world in which the lab and scientsts are situated.  So the author has it both ways: structures are constructed, but "actors will confront structures that are already constructed and that these structures will shape parctices".  There is a tradition of studying laboratories (a whole area in STS) - but many of these, including the most famous by Latour and Woolgar [***], study labs that are insulated from the application of their science.  Kleinman studies a lab that not only researches the basic science, but also the application of the science, and has collaborations with the university tech transfer office as well as agro-businesses.  Kleinman acts as a participant observer in the lab (like a tech who actually screens soil samples and what not as well as an ethnographer) for a while and then just an observer.

He was in the lab at a really key point.  Patenting of rDNA technology, a Supreme Court decision allowing the patenting of genes and things, the increasing importance of corporate funding of university biotechnology labs (even if still a small % of the university's total research funding), the Bayh-Dole act, and the commercialization and standardization of biological research materials all impact the way this lab does science. (p294-5). (as an aside - interesting background on biocontrol - what this lab studies - contrasted with chemicals developed after WW2 - also compare with studies used in diffusion of innovations research).  The acceptance of a chemical fungicide that performs about the same function as the lab's biocontrol agent means that the agent is used as a yardstick - the new agent must be as effective, easy to use, and inexpensive as the existing.  The lab was using commercially prepared polymerase - which it turned out, was contaminated so was messing up their results.  This is an example of how the lab is dependent on a limited number companies for standardized resources sometimes treat like black boxes, trusting the specifications from the catalog..  

The lab discussed making its own instead of buying to avoid contamination issues, but the polymerase was proprietary as was PCR.  Even though there is an exemption for experimental use for basic science, the owner of PCR and the polymerase had sued university and government labs and scientists for patent infringement.  It's not whether or not the university and lab could successfully defend against such a law suit, it's if they have the time and resources to spend doing so.  Also, if they do lose, or win but the basic research right is narrowed, it could really cost them for future work. It's easier to pay than to defend a moral right - particularly when your goal is to do science.  

The lab regularly applies for patents, but the author didn't see evidence of them changing what the lab studies to increase the number of patents. What follows that is a discussion like my point above - the evidence does not back up the idea that patent protection is critical for innovation - but people believe that it is, and to collaborate with industry university labs in biotech need to patent and license.  The leader of the lab also uses patents to attract industry notice and research funding.  Unfortunately, university tech transfer officials might not be in harmony with the lab - they might grant an exclusive license which would impede the lab from working with other companies.

So compare this with Polyani's [****] discussion of the invisible hand, in which there's a marketplace for ideas in science, and scientists work on those that are most promising and to which they can make the biggest contribution.  In this case, the milieu of the lab has a lot to do with the research problems selected, particularly if the university tech transfer office writes the licenses carelessly.  Likewise, the patenting of the inputs to the lab makes them more expensive, means there are fewer suppliers, and that the experiments might need to be done differently.

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[*] Nevermind the fact that discussing or disclosing an invention to anyone besides the inventor starts certain clocks and that inventors should already have official disclosures and maybe provisional applications in via their tech transfer office prior to discussing an invention at any meeting.  Also nevermind the idea that you might intentionally publish either formally or informally to prevent someone else from patenting.
[**] Please note that >80% of the people reading this blog will know 100% more about this area of science than either I or the author of the piece - but that's not the point!
[***] Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
[****]Polanyi, M. (2000). The republic of science: Its political and economic theory. Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning & Policy, 38, 1-21.