I have spent my entire adult life as a journalist, and I know how the “game” works. Thankfully, I work in a specialized form of journalism that digs deeply into the field or “beat” I cover, and I focus my work on providing helpful, practical information for professionals, based on my best efforts to decipher their information needs in their jobs. I consider it the highest calling of a journalist, to serve ones readers and get to know their real-world challenges in order to deliver better, more useful articles.

But in the world of newspapers and other mass media, it’s all about the game. That is, find the negative, look for the man biting the dog, whip up a frenzy, seek out and promote controversy, throw Molotov cocktails of “news” into the crowded theater of public awareness and worry about the collateral damage later. Or not at all. Or better yet, wait for the collateral damage to stoke more fires and cover them too.

All it takes to start a massive inferno is a single match, and reporters are always on the prowl for that match. In the tech transfer arena, the “match” typically relates to the friction between the purity of the university mission and its research, and the business issues that stem from efforts to commercialize that research. It is a complex issue, and there are credible arguments to be made for reducing conflicts, improving relationships between researchers and TTOs, and making the entire commercialization enterprise more transparent. What does not help at all, however, is the media’s willingness to take a one-sided view and run with it – to light the match and stoke the fire — with not so much as a keystroke to provide balance and depth, all in the name of “public service.”

That’s exactly what happened yet again — on the heels of similar “coverage” by the New York Times and other mass media — in a recent article, “Lucrative inventions pit scientists against universities,” by USA TODAY reporter Dan Vergano. Here’s his lead to the article:

Science, that lofty realm of the mind, where thoughts of fortune and financial gain never intrude.

Or do they?

“Oh, you bet it does,” says Renee Kaswan of IP Advocate, an Atlanta-based researchers’ patent-rights organization. “And it’s urgent that someone take the side of researchers in educating them about their rights to their inventions,” Kaswan says.

Dr. Kaswan, if you missed our coverage in previous editions of e-News or its parent publication Technology Transfer Tactics, is not exactly an unbiased source. Quite the opposite. Still embroiled in a nasty dispute with the University of Georgia over a multi-million dollar deal for a blockbuster eye drug she invented, Kaswan recently launched the IP Advocate web site in what appears to be a personal mission to exact revenge by skewering university tech transfer under the guise of charitable advocacy for fairness to faculty innovators and better relations with TTOs. Dr. Kaswan may well have a legitimate beef with UGA over her invention and the many millions she will receive from the deal the school struck. According to UGA, her combative attitude nearly scuttled the entire agreement, and the university admittedly acted without her input or consent in finalizing an agreement, which she maintains cost her another fortune in future royalties. Ever since, and using IP Advocate as her gun and a near-daily public relations release as ammunition, she has been at war with tech transfer. Her latest release was based on the recent decision in a Stanford University legal fight with another inventor, this one turning on IP ownership; the researcher signed rights over to a company after having developed it under an employment agreement with the school. Unfortunately for Stanford, the language in that agreement was fuzzy at best, and did not clearly spell out that faculty inventions are by contract assigned to and owned by the university. That’s what the decision against Stanford concluded, but Kaswan contended in her breathless press release that the decision turned Bayh-Dole on its head and freed researchers from the shackles of their university masters.

Bunk. Pure bunk, as any IP attorney worth his or her salt will attest.

Yet USA TODAY and its reporter dutifully regurgitated Kaswan’s release. Though the reporter did at least cast doubt on her legal claims, he did nothing to balance her charges regarding university research commercialization efforts, leaving TTOs once again with a “bad guy” label that is so undeserved that it pains me to see this happen, again and again.

Here’s another juicy excerpt from the USA TODAY:

The Bayh-Dole Act, intended to spur commercialization of taxpayer-supported inventions, has instead become a spur to the hides of researchers, Kaswan says, with universities using it sell off their inventions on the cheap to savvy biotech firms. “They don’t care as long as they sell it, even to firms who purchase ideas just to throttle possible competition.”

And another:

“Universities are increasingly the sources of many inventions, but they are also this bottleneck for innovation with everything ending up in court,” Kaswan says.

The match is lit. The fire stoked. The newspaper has left its millions of readers’ mouths agape. But it told so little of the story, taking the easy, cheap shot approach so common today, and so unfortunate for all who truly wish to understand complex issues in a complex world. That’s not USA TODAY’s forte.

I’m a little guy on the media stage. This e-zine will reach about 200,000 research commercialization professionals around the world — not millions. But I hope I reach a few that will make the effort to set things right, or balance this scorecard just a little bit. Tech transfer professionals have a hard enough job as it is, taking flack from both administrators and innovators while attempting to navigate valuable inventions through a maze of personal, political, legal, and financial hurdles. They are largely unheralded for this yeoman’s work, and don’t complain much about it. But damn it, they don’t deserve to be publicly flogged for their tireless work to bring technological solutions to global problems and help critical research from their labs become useful to the public, rather than sitting in a researcher’s beaker and lab notes.

For another view of tech transfer and its impact, continue reading to the next item on the economic impact of university-industry partnerships.

David Schwartz
Publisher
Technology Transfer Tactics

Posted November 4th, 2009 under Tech Transfer

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