Do Innovators In Science Deserve Research Support As A Royalty?

In a recent retrospective, I mused about the similarity in role and function between inventors in the world of commerce and innovators in the realm of scientific research (J.B. Fenn, Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, 46:1-41, 1996). Noting that inventors can apply for a patent, which provides them with exclusive use of the invention for a limited time, I suggested that innovators in research should also receive something more palpable than references to their work in the publications of their competitors, a sort of noblesse oblige that is not always faithfully fulfilled. I also suggested that the philosophy of the patent system might provide a useful basis for rewarding scientific innovation. These general ideas apparently resonated with others of my ilk and thus led to this commentary. The first patent of record was issued by the Republic of Florence in 1421. Since then, the custom of awarding patents for discoveries and inventions has become well established in most industrialized countries. It began in the United States shortly after the Constitution of 1787 empowered Congress "to promote the progress of . . . the useful arts, by securing for limited time to . . . inventors the exclusive right to their discoveries." The justifications for granting such an exclusive right in the form of a patent include rewarding the inventor so as to stimulate inventive activity; encouraging full disclosure of the invention's subject matter, thus making it available to the public; fostering the production and sale of goods made possible by the invention; and disseminating the art that the patent teaches. Underlying this commentary is a recognition that sponsored research has become a big business, as competitive as any commercial enterprise in the struggle for "customers" and "market share." Indeed, performing sponsored research is the primary raison d' etre for many enterprises, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Even in academia, where institutions generally prohibit a faculty member from supplementing salary with income from sponsored research, that faculty member's standing-and, indirectly, his or her income-can depend very strongly on success in obtaining grants. Many members of academic institutions are expected to spend most of their efforts in procuring and performing sponsored research. Therefore, if inventors are to be rewarded with patents for new discoveries and inventions that can promote commerce, perhaps innovators who discover new paths to progress in science should be similarly entitled to some sort of compensation, over and above the fleeting satisfaction of seeing references to their papers in journal articles. Clearly, there are differences between invention and innovation to be taken into account. Defining the essential features of an invention and the scope of the exclusive use that a consequent patent can provide is an arcane art, subject to meticulously crafted rules. For innovation, essence and scope are often much more difficult, and maybe impossible, to characterize as precisely. Like obscenity, one may know it when one sees it, but a "legal" definition remains elusive. The value of an invention as defined in a patent, and thus the return to its inventor, is determined by market forces that provide an objective and essentially unquestionable judgment on commercial worth in terms of dollars and cents. As for innovation, though its definition may be elusive, its value can be estimated fairly precisely and objectively in terms of the frequency with which it is referenced in published papers. Indeed, such evaluation is routinely performed in the Science Citation Index, whose published figures are sometimes used, not always intelligently, in determining the rank and salary of an employee or the credentials of a nominee for an award. Another measure of value for an innovation or discovery is the amount of support that sponsoring agencies provide for research rooted in that innovation or discovery. This observation leads to the idea that an agency sponsoring research in an area having its origins in an innovation by a previous investigator should be required to provide that investigator support for research. Thus, for example, Richard Smalley and his colleagues who discovered fullerenes should be provided support for further research that they might want to pursue on buckyballs or related topics. The extent of such support might be some modest percentage of the total amount of funding the agency supplies to other investigators of carbon structures. I would be delighted with support for my research in the amount of a small percentage of the funding that sponsoring agencies now provide others for research based on Electrospray Ionization (ESI), a method for turning biological molecules into ions for mass analysis (J.B. Fenn et al., Science, 246:64-71, 1989). Perhaps this "royalty" for using ESI or studying fullerenes could be funded by a "tax" on the grants to those other investigators. The possibility of royalties in the form of support would seem to promise many benefits. They would stimulate and encourage investigators to produce new ideas and to disclose them promptly, thus expediting progress in science and technology. They would discourage some growing tendencies for innovators to keep new ideas secret until they can arrange appropriate support or can exploit them surreptitiously. Had I been more circumspect 10 years ago and succumbed to the temptation of more restraint in disclosing ESI's capabilities, I could have assured my lab of support that is now elusive and perhaps have put more gold in the glow of my sunset years. But such self-serving would have denied the community of science and technology full access to a technique that gave rise to nearly 1,000 publications last year and has become a key analytical tool in the pharmaceutical industry. John B. Fenn is a research professor in the department of chemistry and an affiliate professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Do Innovators In Science Deserve Research Support As A Royalty?

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