US: Bayh-Dole patent act under scrutiny

The law of unintended consequences is perhaps less a 'law' than a simple statement of fact: we cannot accurately predict all the results of our actions, writes Anet Rae-Dupree in the New York Times. We may do something with the best of intentions, and sometimes even accomplish the good toward which we aim. Yet, at the same time, we are all too often surprised by results that didn't occur to us beforehand. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (aka the University Small Business Patent Procedures Act) started out with the best of intentions - but now it is under scrutiny by swelling ranks of critics.

By clearing away the thicket of conflicting rules and regulations at various federal agencies, it set out to encourage universities to patent and license results of federally financed research. For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic reward of new discovery.

University "tech transfer" offices have boomed from a couple dozen before the law's passage to nearly 300 today. University patents have leapt a hundredfold. Professors are stepping away from the lab and lecture hall to navigate the thicket of venture capital, business regulations and commercial competition. But there is concern that its original intent - to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation - has also distorted the fundamental mission of universities.

Full report on the New York Times site