The U.S. Supreme Court case Stanford v. Roche, which centered on Stanford University’s attempt to assert control over an HIV-detection kit invented by School of Medicine professor Mark Holodniy, appeared to come down to semantics. Fortunately, the ruling on June 6 is not fatal to the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to retain title to inventions made during federally funded scientific studies and is necessary for universities to further develop inventions made with grant money.
While Stanford v. Roche is a unique case due to the ambiguities surrounding Holodniy’s contracts, the case is significant because it exemplifies the importance of clear contracts between institutions sponsoring projects with federal grants and the professors who have access to that money.
Though the Supreme Court ruled that Holodniy’s contract with Cetus Corporation — later acquired by Roche Molecular Systems Inc. — took precedence over his contract with Stanford, the case can still be used as a learning tool for research universities. Contractual agreements must be clear in order for the Bayh-Dole Act to apply. Without such clarity, a university cannot retain title to inventions — an unfortunate loss for both research universities and the people they serve.
When applied, the Bayh-Dole Act maintains the public nature of federally funded research. In most instances, the royalties that ensue from inventions made with federal dollars should be used in a public manner. In the case of a research university, these royalties should be used for education and research funds, maintaining scientific excellence and ultimately benefiting the community.
While it is difficult to deny the importance of intellectual property and the rights of individual inventors, a balance must be found where royalties arising from grant-sponsored research are clearly marked for both the researcher and the public who sponsored the research through tax money.
The University of California is a flagship research university partly because it attracts world-renowned scholars and partly because it continues to serve the people of California through innovation. We hope that Stanford v. Roche reminds the students, faculty and administration of the stakes: funding, research and title.
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importance in fostering collaborative enterprises and its substantial benefit to the American economy.” Over the last 51 years UC San Diego has been used as an ATM. The costs of the failed scientific experiments at UCSD and elsewhere in the University of California sytem were socialized by grants and fees paid into public higher education by the federal and state governments, by parents, and students — while the profits were privatized by Professor Irwin M. Jacobs, and by former UCSD Chancellor and University President Emeritus Richard C. Atkinson, among others. Since 1980, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been granted control of 3,673 patents. A recent study found that companies started by M.I.T.’s graduates, faculty and staff generate annual world sales of $2 trillion. Atkinson, whose name appears on my diploma, should have been far more vigilant in obtaining ironclad assignments from faculty members and monitoring any contracts between researchers and private companies. According to your June 15, 2011 article, tuition is again going up. The Daily Cal implies that nothing can be done about it, since Yudof can throw his hands up in the air, since the regents nominally oppose such increases at this time, and since the State of California only pays eight percent of the operating budget anyway. Are you the brood of Mario Savio, who lost faith in JFK because that president let a private company run the Telstar communications satellites? If Atkinson and Jacobs had not been locked in a two-step, UCSD would have earned billions of dollars which could have been used for lowering tuition.
Scottish college students paid little or no tuition for most of the Twentieth Century because they held stock in the companies of Andrew Carnegie. A few months ago another federal judge (citing California law) ruled that a plaintiff had to put up a $800,000 bond before proceeding to trial in a patents-infringement lawsuit against Qualcomm. This can’t be good for innovative research, for the California economy, nor for the current crop of mostly passive Bears’ bottom line.