The Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain Proceedings of a Symposium (2003) / Chapter Skim
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11. The Urge to Commercialize: Interactions Between Public and Private Research and Development
11. The Urge to Commercialize: Interactions Between Public and Private Research and Development
Pages 87-94
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From page 87... ...
This has been increasing on a large scale since World War II in almost every discipline. 1 The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Stephen McCormack and LeRoy Walters and the DNA Patent Database at Georgetown University.
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From page 88... ...
In particular, they thought about their role in economic growth, in addition to the traditional university roles of creating knowledge and disseminating knowledge. At the same time, we have seen intellectual property grow in strength and quantity; this has been happening historically during this postwar period, most prominently in the United States.
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From page 89... ...
The Institute and HGS were initially looking for human genes by picking out the parts of the genome that were known to code for proteins and then looking for those proteins that were most likely to be thrown outside the cell, to span cell surface membranes, to bind DNA, or to serve other known functions. HGS would look for DNA sequences corresponding to proteins that might be valuable to pharmaceutical companies or to themselves to develop into pharmaceuticals, and they focused on characterizing the whole gene, sequencing it, and then doing some biology to figure out what it did.
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From page 90... ...
Out of that movement grew some very concrete policies, including the so-called Bermuda Rules or Bermuda Principles, which grew out of a meeting that the Wellcome Trust and other funders held in Bermuda. The policy was an agreement to dump data quickly into public sequence databases.
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From page 91... ...
It requires coordination, lots of paperwork, and it costs money to file and process applications, but it appears to be an effective defensive patenting strategy. The publicly funded Mammalian Gene Collection and its parallel program, the Cancer Genome Anatomy Program, pursue policies to promote rapid data disclosure into the public domain.
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From page 92... ...
That does not include the privately held genomics firms that tend to be smaller but are much more numerous. These figures are quite uncertain, but if they can be used as a rough indicator, about a third of genomics funding comes from government and nonprofit organizations, and two-thirds of the funding, at least in 2000, was spent in private R&D.
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From page 93... ...
Molecular genetics appears to be a field in which private-sector actors step in to bolster the public domain. The public domain or the public funders create intellectual property subject to the Bayh-Dole
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From page 94... ...
It is very clear that at least for these genomic startups, private firms believed that their patent portfolio mattered. Their intellectual property mattered and that partially drove this high level of private investment in genomics and in biotechnology more generally.
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