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Clr 9 OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

  

August 1, 1978

Mr. J. Ralph Shay
Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon 97331

Dear Mr. Shay:

I have your letter of July 21 commenting on my remarks to
Senator Nelson about rights to patents.

I am sure that what I wrote to the Senator is far from the last
word: of wisdom about how to deal with this problem and may well be
short of my own ultimate and considered judgments. I do agree with
the Senator that the subject is worthy of some ventilation and feel
that you and I are agreed upon the main point: That putting patents
into the public domain or into the hands of a politically accountable
government bureaucracy frustrates the principle developmental
function of the patent system.

I would certainly admit that I had not given much thought to
the state and regional aspects of technology transfer that you
mentioned in your letter. As you said yourself these are often not
reasonably within the patent domain in the first place.

There are also likely to be differences of perspective as
between a stace institution where the legislature is likely, in any
case, to recapture a public interest in university owned property in
contrast to private institutions. In view of the developmental
functions of such state university activities as the agricultural
experiment stations one can see, I would agree, that such institutions
have been involved in appropriate technology transfer in a way that
involves no great changes in the present system.

Most of your letter seemed to be concerned with questions other
than the disposition of large potential income from patents and it
is the potential biasing on the academic process from that source
that was my own principal concern. I would certainly be the first
to want to exclude from any manditory transfer to the NRDF those
intellectual properties which could well be administered by the source
institution and which did not involve substantial flows of cash. I
did have in mind that NRDF might in fact incorporate the Research
Corporation or operate in a similar fashion: I am enclosing a copy
Shay
Page 2
8-1-78

of my full letter that enlarges on the structure of that proposal
in ways that were intended to distinguish it from a government agency
but which did not appear in the printed extract.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg

JL/gel

Enclosure