Science - It's all about money

In 2011, universities filed more than 12,000 patents earned $1.8bn from commercialising their "intellectual property"

 Just imagine, you think you have a cure for cancer. Your first impulse might be to share your discovery. Tell the world! But not so fast. The Economic Espionage Act of 1995 makes it a federal offence punishable by up to 15 years in prison for someone to "knowingly" deliver a "trade secret" into the hands of a foreign government or institution.

Hua Jun Zhao, a  researcher at Wisconsin Medical College, was recently accused of stealing several vials of a potentially cancer-fighting compound he was working on with the intent of passing it on to a university in China, allegedly as his own work. If true, Zhao certainly committed a crime - theft - and perhaps intended to commit academic fraud. However, the FBI allege that he used his position to "illegally acquire patented cancer research material and to have taken steps to provide that material to Zhejiang University in China". Among the goals served by his arrest, the bureau stated, was protecting America's "competitiveness in an age of globalisation". The irony is that if researchers at Wisconsin Medical College had simply been more open about their "patented cancer research material", someone like Zhao would have no incentive to take it. There's no point in trying to pass someone else's research off as your own when the whole world already knows about it. But, and this is important: the secrecy makes some people rich.

"If you think that your goal as a scientist is to cure disease, you want people in China and everywhere else in the world to know about," said Michael Eisen, a biologist and advocate of "open science" at the University of California, Berkeley. "Only if you think your purpose is to generate patents and make money do you keep these kinds of things secret," he says. "It's a gross perversion of the whole mission of academic research."

"Patents are about keeping things away from people for the purpose of making money," explained Rosalyn Yalow, who won a Nobel prize in 1977 for her work on radioimmunoassay (RIA). The introduced technology revolutionised medicine, allowing medical professionals to detect antibodies and contaminants in a person's blood, which is useful in the fight against hepatitis, cancer and a whole host of other disorders. If you have ever given blood, your blood has probably been tested using RIA. "We never thought of patenting RIA." She was often asked if she regretted not using her invention to get rich, but Yalow wanted as many people to use it as possible. "Anyway, we had no time for such nonsense," she said.

 Patenting RIA would have meant more people receiving tainted blood transfusions; more people first learning they had cancer when it was already too late. It would have meant more people dying. Patenting RIA would have meant increased suffering for a lot of people, but it also would have meant a lot of money for a few.

If the technique had been developed today on a college campus, there is no way the inventor would be permitted to just give it away. Indeed, under legislation passed by Congress in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act , academic researchers are obligated to report any commercially promising discoveries to the higher-ups. Stanford University instructs its researchers to report any idea or invention with the potential to "return at least $100,000 to the university over the lifetime of the patent". The university will also patent research on the advice of a "company expert, a consultant, or a venture capitalist". Universities have set up "technology transfer" offices on campus whose sole purpose it is to try and commercialise their academic research.

 Lawyers for the University of California, consistently one of the top academic filers of patents in the US, urged the Supreme Court justices to side with agricultural giant Monsanto in a battle over whether farmers could plant successive generations of the company's genetically modified seeds without paying licensing fees.  University of California said that strengthening the US patent regime was important, pointing out that a loss for Monsanto would mean one could "make an unlimited number of identical copies of an invention without having to compensate the patentee for those subsequent copies. In a short period of time, the market for the technology would become saturated with copies." In other words, once expensive and artificially scarce technology would become cheap and abundant, absent the free protection the state offers patent holders. And scientists could freely study this technology. Awful.

Henry Dale, a British pharmacologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1936, wrote that, "the primary and special function of research in the universities is to build the main fabric of knowledge by free and untrammeled inquiry and to be concerned with the practical uses of it, only as these arise in the course of a natural development"

"All publicly funded research should be in the public domain - no patents, no copyrights, no restrictions on use, period," says Michael Eisen, a  UC Berkeley biologist and co-founder of the Public Library of Science, which supports the free distribution of scientific work. "This should be our primary mission," says Eisen. "Otherwise, we're just poorly organised branches of companies."

The Conscripted Scientist

"The root cause driving austerity," Marshall G Hussain Shuler, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University sees it, "is rampant militarism."

Research in neuroscience is increasingly being conducted with an eye toward potential military applications, such as the treatment of combat-related PTSD by way of regret-erasing drugs. And that's because of who is funding more and more of the research these days: the military. Indeed, the chief financial backer of President Obama's recently announced $100m " BRAIN Initiative" - billed as a "bold new research effort to revolutionise our understanding of the human mind" - is the Defense Department not the Institute of Health.

Of the $140bn in research and development funding from the government more than half goes through the Department of Defense; less than $30bn through the National Institutes of Health. That invariably leads to a shift in resources, with scientists going to where the money is: instead of finding ways to cure, finding high-tech ways to kill or otherwise aid the war effort. Researchers at the University of Arizona, for instance, received a $1.5m grant to "adapt their breast cancer imaging research for detection of embedded explosives"

Adapted from this Al Jazeera article