Roche Beats Stanford

On Monday, June 6, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a fascinating patent-law decision, STANFORD UNIVERSITY v. ROCHE, in which it held that title to the intellectual property in a federally-funded invention does not necessarily vest in the institution receiving those federal funds.

In so doing, the Court limited the scope of some of the language of the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980, also known as the Bayh-Dole Act.

The IP in question is to a diagnostic test for HIV involving a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), developed by a Stanford research fellow named Mark Holodniy. Under the Bayh-Dole Act, in a provision that was designed precisely to encourage federally-funded universities to engage in cutting-edge research, the rights to the PCR diagnostic would have been Stanford's, but for a contract Holodniy signed with Cetus, a company where he was a visiting scientist, in which he said he does "hereby assign" his rights to Cetus.

The great thing about PCR is that it does more than simply discover the presence of HIV. It measures the amount of the virus in a patient's blood stream, thus determining whether and to what degree he is benefitting from therapy.

In 1991 Cetus was acquired by, and its rights passed to, Roche.

In 2005, Stanford brought a lawsuit contending that Roche was illegally selling HIV test kits that infringed on Stanford's patents. Roche responded that it was a co-owner of the procedure. The matter went to the Supreme Court, with Stanford claiming that Holoniy had no right to assign to Cetus/Roche, because the right belonged by law to Stanford, so the document in which he purports to make that assignation is void.

U.S. patent law gives the initial IP right to the inventor. The inventor can then assign it away, to one party or another or no one, as he deems best. Indeed, the Constitution gives Congress the authority to secure "to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It does not give the Congress the authority to secure that exclusive right to an institution employing the authors and inventors. The rather stark individualistic language refers to the authors and inventors themselves.

This decision was not in a strict sense a constitutional decision. It interpreted the language in Bayh-Dodd in such a way as to avoid any conflict with the relevant clause of the constitution. But it certainly did invoke the policy that the majority sees the document's language as endorsing.

Institutions such as Stanford will not suffer any great wound from this decision. They simply have to tighten up the language of their own employment contracts for their postdocs and others to make sure they have the assignation rights from the Holodniys of the world before anyone else puts a well-drafted document in front of any of them. Yet a principle is affirmed, by virtue of the fact that Stanford takes this loss and has to rework its contracts, the principle that the choice, in the first instance, must lie with the Holodniys.

More on Marc Hauser

In September I wrote about Marc Hauser director of the Behavior Program at Harvard University, now on leave.

As I noted, Hauser acquired some renown for experiments on the cognition of primates, especially cotton-top tamerin. His experiments were thought to contribute to evolutionary psycholigy, i.e. to an understanding of the biological roots of our behavior as humans. His results, though, are now regarded as presumptively tainted, due to "evidence of scientific misconduct" in connection with some of his reported data.

So ... what is new? One of his controversial results has been rehabilitated -- has been, if you will, cleansed of that taint. This is big news, now just for those other primates but for human beings, and for the study of psychology as a natural science.

Justin N. Wood was the first named author, and Hauser the second, on the original paper, published in September 2007.

It found that certain non-human primates can distinguish intentional gestures by human beings from merely accidental or random movements.

This rather confirms my view, expressed last week, that the most humanly important fact taught to laypeople in general by scientific work on evolution is that we are path dependent beings. Who we are depends upon our history. For a discussion of the notion of path dependence in the social sciences go here.

Science News: Panspermia

There is something new on this subject. But I'm not writing a news report, so I'll bury my lede and begin with some introduction of the topic.

Panspermia, as one can infer from the "seeds-everywhere" etymology, is the theory that the seeds of life are ubiquitous in the cosmos, and that they sporadically land on planets where conditions are propitious for their development.

Panspermia divides naturally into two sorts. One might think the spreading of these seeds a spontaneous or a directed fact.

Directed panspermia is a view associated for example with Francis Crick (no shabby authority, one of the co-founders of modern molecular biology). He believed that the earth is an unlikely place for the development of life out of non-life. He suggested though, that there are more likely planets, and that on one of them life, and even "a higher civilization," might have developed "perhaps eight to 10 billion years ago," and it may deliberately have seeded the universe, using bacteria that can be "stored almost indefinitely at very low temperatures."

Spontaneous panspermia, associated with the almost-equally renowned name of Svante Arrhenius, a chemist who published WORLDS IN THE MAKING more than a century ago, argues that no such direction is necessary -- spores might randomly escape one planet and then travel through space pressed by electromagnetic radiation until captured by the gravity of another.

So: what is the news? The Journal of Cosmology has published a paper by Dr. Richard Hoover, of NASA, which offers evidence for panspermia (of the spontaneous sort). The paper has the formidable title: "Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites." It maintains that certain microfossils discovered in the interior of carbonaceous meteorites are "the fossilized remains of living organisms which lived in the parent bodies of these meteors, e.g. comets, moons, and other astral bodies." Meteors are, then, a plausible mechanism for the life transfer that spontaneous panspermia requires.

The Journal of Cosmology is a serious peer-reviewed publication and its editor-in-chief is a serious guy, one Dr. Rudy Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Schild posted a note with the pre-publication copy of the paper indicating that he has asked 100 experts for critical analysis. and that their responses will be published along with the paper.

I look forward to following a stimulating discussion. Given such important claims, there wil and should be a good deal of skepticism. Still, on philosophical grounds this is a theory to which I for one am inclined to give credence.

The March of Science

The latest news on biochemical engineering is fascinating and, to my mind at least, quite disturbing. Here's the BBC account.

Apparently, the scientists took the genome of one species of the bacterial genus Mycoplasma and sequenced it. They used that data to produce the same sequence in vitro. They injected this DNA into the cell of a different species of Mycoplasma, creating a hybrid.

In a message board, someone has offered me the following analogy, "You take a Ford V8 and tear it apart, make measurements and draw a blueprint of the engine. Then you go into your home foundary & machine shop and builld your own copy of the Ford V8.

"Then you put that Ford V8 in an old Chevy and drive it around the block.

"You haven't even designed a new car, let alone invented the automobile, but it is a pretty impressive bit of engineering for an amateur."

That's what worries me. Even if the significance of this step has been overstated in some of the coverage, it does seem that our species is getting depressingly impressive at engineering the basics of life.

Geology as a Science

Why is it so difficult to predict earthquakes?

Ingenious scientists have been studying the matter for a long time, there is a wonderful incentive for success in this endeavor -- since many lives as well as a lot of property are threatened by the continued randomness of these planetary upheavals -- and the basic theory of plate tectonics seems to have been worked out in elaborate detail. So ... why no predictions?

Here's a column on the general point by Robert Roy Britt, managing editor of LiveScience.

But what Britt doesn't mention is the intriguing fact that geology is a science with a sample size of one. In the study of human physiology and its disorders, we can treat any human who has ever been subjected to medical study as a separate sample. From all of these samples, the relevant research community can draw important generalizations. In the study of the internal workings of the earth and what (from our puny point of view as its surface dwellers) we may call its "disorders," though, we have only the one Earth. Our knowledge of other planets is rudimentary, our knowledge of their internal workings is, I suspect, nil.

We have many observations of the earth and different earthquakes, but the multiplicity of observations doesn't make for a large sample. You can take my temperature several times, if you like. Each of those readings will be a fact about a single organism, reflecting either its equilibrium or some change in its condition over the period in which your measurements were take. There is still just the one organism.

This line of thought could lead us in any of several directions, most of them moving far beyond the quotidian difficulty in predicting earthquakes with which we began. It could lead us into metaphysics, for example, and the question of what constitutes a "thing," an "entity," even if you like a "substantial form." That is on some readings THE problem of metaphysics. But I'll leave off here for the day.

A Passage to India

Inspired by a recent viewing of the classic movie A Passage to India on a DVD, I decided to get a hold of the famous novel.

I'm reading through Forster's classic now, with great delight.

There's a thoughtful bit early on that involves two missionaries, Church of England presumably, and their debates with one another about the theological consequences of evolution. Or ... I think that's what it's about. Tell me if I'm wrong.

The missionaries, Graysford and Sorley by name, didn't make it into the movie at all (unless there's a bit I've forgotten already). They are present in the book so far as I can tell not as plot elements but as pieces of scenery -- local color. And here's the passage by which I'm intrigued:

Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah [of "our Father's house"], be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr sorley's mind but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, aand was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

Now there's a fascinating slide down the Great Chain of Being!