Science, Patents, Progress

Even as Fiona Murray was pressing on toward her chemistry doctorate at Harvard, she was thinking about broader issues related to science’s role in society.

Though her scientific focus was environmental chemistry — specifically the behavior of human-created contaminants — Murray also took policy courses. That helped her grapple with issues like how to integrate economic factors into pollution-control models: “if you want to cut pollution by a certain amount,” Murray says by way of example, “how do you think about the kinds of investments that need to be made, and by whom?”

After graduating Murray, now the Sarofim Family Associate Professor of Management at MIT, migrated out of direct involvement with science, but not out of science policy. “The big question for me,” she notes, “is how we translate science into something of real economic and social value, and also, how we educate scientists for that role.”

Such interests have taken Murray into some of the most challenging terrain in the business and policy worlds. And while she’s traveled widely in those worlds, a lot of her work has focused on the thorny issue of intellectual property.

A quarter century ago, the federal government decreed that the title to inventions made in the course of federally sponsored research would be held by the institutions where the work was done, including universities. The idea was to spur these institutions to find applications for such inventions. And, says Murray, it worked.

“The number of patents based on university research has been rising at an incredible rate,” she notes. Studies show the system has also sharply boosted the number of university inventions that yield useable products, which can range from new drugs to better solar panels.

Fiona Murray has the ability to push for what she sees as smart policies in such areas because her work has given her an impressive level of visibility

Murray, who’s done a lot of work with biotech firms, has seen the benefits firsthand. “A lot of these smaller companies wouldn’t exist without access to intellectual property rights,” she says. She’s also close enough to the university research scene, especially in the life sciences, to be confident faculty researchers aren’t shunning important questions to focus on topics chosen simply for their patent potential.

At any leading research university, she notes, “there’s still tremendous pressure to do high-quality work.” (She also notes that many of today’s most important research areas seem to lead naturally to both first-rate publications and to patents — a point she has built on in studies of the impact of intellectual property rights on science.)

But Murray also says some of what has occurred since the federal policy shift hasn’t been so positive. She and colleagues, for example, found that woman scientists are less likely than their male peers to obtain patents. That fact, says Murray, means some of these women “are denied the benefits that working closely with companies can bring.”

Recent evidence finds encouraging trends on this front: younger women faculty in the sciences, says Murray, seem to be seeking patents at rates not far from those of their male counterparts.

More broadly, though, she worries that increased patenting may be creating problems within academic science. “Its not the patents per se that are the problem,” she notes, “it’s that the way universities sometimes use them can lead to things like research delays or to frustrations in working with industry.”

Murray has ideas about how to deal with that and related issues. For example, she says, “I do think that academic researchers should try to reinforce the traditional research commons, and eschew placing limits on their peers who want to use methods or materials cited in patented work.” She further thinks industry should do the same: “After all, the benefits from having leading academics use industry’s ideas and materials typically outweigh the costs.”

As it happens, Murray has the ability to push for what she sees as smart policies in such areas because her work has given her an impressive level of visibility. Though extensively involved in quiet efforts to help shape how executives in science- and technology based firms work with academics, she’s also had articles on various topics appear in prestigious publications like Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. And this fall, she’s attending the national meeting of a leading association of university technology licensing officers — as keynote speaker.

by Richard Anthony « Previous | Next »

On Topic: faculty, patents+licensing