The session was conceived as "sort of a greatest hits package," says Steven Ferguson, deputy director of the NIH division of technology development and transfer. The division organized a similar symposium last year and expects to make it a fixture of future festivals. The examples to choose from are plentiful: more than 1,200 license agreements for commercialization of NIH inventions have been signed since 1993, generating two-thirds of all federal government royalty income.
Two of the presenters this year-Robert S. Balaban of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and Hynda K. Kleinman of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR)-emphasized the roles played in their discoveries by chance and mischance.
Balaban, chief of the lab of cardiac energetics in NHLBI, described a moment of revelation that arose from an unexpected experimental result. In the 1980s, he and colleagues were using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine ...
