The Great American Heist-How the Bayh-Dole Act Wrested Public Science from the People's Hands

[BeckyDem]

Alexander Zaitchik

August 29 2021, 6:00 a.m.


1979: Inventing Competitiveness

On the morning of June 6, 1979, Navy Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the longest-serving officer in the history of the U.S. armed services, sat down before a Senate subcommittee on the Constitution. Famous as the father of the nuclear submarine program, Rickover had recently emerged as that rarest of Washington breeds: a top-brass crusader against waste and corruption in defense contracting. On this day, he deployed his reputation and characteristic bluntness to stop a bill called the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act.

At stake was the government’s long-standing proprietorship of patents on inventions resulting from the research it underwrote. The proposed legislation would hand patents over to the private contractors that conducted research at government expense, essentially gutting the government’s ownership stake and paving the way for monopolization. The bill’s supporters — those in favor of removing this block — included drug companies, venture capital firms, university patent offices, and the nascent biotech industry. Those opposed to this sweeping change in federal patent policy were led by a fading Democratic coalition committed to New Deal ideas about antitrust regulation, patents, and public science controlled in the public interest. Rickover was a lone but strong military voice for this coalition: a war hero with the authority of having overseen the construction of the first nuclear propulsion systems, one of the most complex government science programs since the Manhattan Project.


Speaking before the subcommittee, Rickover railed against the proposed policy changes. “Government contractors should not be given title to inventions developed at government expense,” he said. “These inventions are paid for by the public and therefore should be available for any citizen to use or not as he sees fit.”

This seemed self-evident to Rickover. After all, he noted, “companies generally claim title to the inventions of their employees on the basis that the company pays their wages.” It befuddled and angered him that the U.S. government would consider giving up its own shop rights to industries that would never do the same. In his decades managing the development of nuclear reactors, Rickover had witnessed the very contest between public interest and private greed so clearly anticipated by mid-century advocates for keeping public science under public control.

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/29/bayh-dole-act-public-science-patents/

[Captain Zero]

1. Evan Bayh was in the Koch Brothers' pocket

First time I ever heard of Koch was in reference to being a Bayh donor. Evan was not nearly as progressive and forward thinking as his father, Birch Bayh.