Word: patent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...result, even more innovation takes place. Massing said patent licensing is a growing source of income for research universities. The passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 underlies this development. The act allows universities to patent inventions resulting from research that receives federal support...
...likened a university's patent portfolio to "fine wines," saying that it takes time for new inventions to yield dividends...
More troubling than determining how to patent the genome is the larger question of whether anyone ought to be laying claim to human DNA at all. This is partly an economic issue. If the entire genetic schematic is pre-emptively owned by the research teams studying it now, where is the incentive for independent scientists--often sources of great innovation--to work on it later? Licensing costs, warns Jeffrey Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics, could hold medical progress hostage. Patenting proponents insist that an equally persuasive argument could be made that the large genome...
...anyone's owning the rights to any part of the human form. Besides, if the first anatomist to spot, say, the pancreas was not granted title to it, why should modern genome-mapping scientists be able to claim even a single gene? As Kahn points out, "You could patent a system for mining gold from ore. We don't let people patent the gold." That kind of argument is grounded not in law but in the very idea of what it means to be human--an issue that even the highest federal court is not likely to settle...
Officials at the National Institutes of Health were delighted that one of their own had struck the mother lode, and they rushed to patent Venter's genes. But across the NIH campus, James Watson, who had won a Nobel for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA and who was then running NIH's Human Genome Project, was outraged. This wasn't science, he insisted. "Virtually any monkey" could do that work, Watson fumed in the opening salvo of a battle that would rage for months--and which smolders to this day. To patent such abbreviated genetic material, said...