Patently Unscientific
Enclosure of the commons has also been occurring in
the world of science. Here, too, the Founders’
intentions were clear. Ben Franklin, no slouch when it
came to the dollar, never sought a patent on his most
famous invention, the Franklin stove. “As we enjoy
great advantages from the inventions of others,” he
wrote, “we should be glad to serve others by any
invention of ours.” Thomas Jefferson, who served as
first head of the U.S. Patent Office, believed the
purpose of the office was to promulgate inventions, not
protect them. He rejected nearly half the applications
submitted during his term. (Eli Whitney’s cotton
gin made it through.)
As with copyrights, this stringent approach to patents
worked well for a long time. America didn’t lack
inventiveness in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (and let it be remembered that we stole much of
our early technology from the British). But from
midcentury to the present, patenting has become a
national pastime. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which let
universities get patents on taxpayer-funded research and
license those patents to corporations, opened the
floodgates. Corporate money rushed into academic labs,
and with it came a corporate mindset. Where scientists
once shared their discoveries openly, many now fear to
discuss them, lest someone beat them to the patent
office. Today, some say, the secrecy is so intense and
the thicket of property rights so dense that the
advancement of research has noticeably slowed.
The U.S. Patent Office has gone along with this,
issuing patents for everything from one-click shopping on
the Internet to genes that are 99 percent nature-made.
Often, companies get patents not with the intention of
developing them, but rather with the intention of suing
someone else who might (a practice known as patent
trolling). Figure 8.1 shows the dramatic rise in number
of patents issued over the past few decades.
Consumers and taxpayers are burdened as well. Thanks
to patents, pharmaceutical companies can charge monopoly
prices for up to twenty years after introducing a new
drug. This is said to benefit society by providing
incentives for research, but according to the Center for
Economic Policy Research, the benefit is greatly exceeded
by the cost. Pharmaceutical companies spend about $25
billion a year on research, of which about 70 percent is
for copycat drugs that mimic competitors’ brands
and add no significant health benefits.
The federal government could fund 100 percent of
noncopycat research — and place the resulting drugs
in the public domain — entirely from cost savings
to Medicare and Medicaid. On top of that, the savings to
consumers from lower drug costs would amount to hundreds
of billions of dollars each year.
To release science from corporate control, we need to
take a twofold approach: apply more stringent standards
for issuing patents, and provide more public funds for
research (with the proviso that publicly funded
discoveries stay in the public domain). The track record
for publicly funded research has, in fact, been
phenomenal. The entire computer industry was spawned by
the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, which produced the first
digital computer in 1945. Similarly, the Internet emerged
from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and
the National Science Foundation in the 1980s. It’s
hard to imagine the modern world without either of these
breakthroughs, or with the Internet being owned, say, by
Verizon or TimeWarner. ...
read the whole chapter