Dr. Richard Vedder
Dr. Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, authored a column in Forbes headlined “Patent Battle: Washington U. in St. Louis 32, University of Wisconsin 0.”
The discovery dimension of higher education mostly involves basic research, but sometimes out of scientific inquiry comes valuable commercial applications. Once most research was conducted by lonely individual researchers with perhaps one or two assistants, but as scientific inquiry has become more complex, lots of expensive equipment are used by teams of scientists, often from multiple universities. Two senior researchers, one from the University of Wisconsin and the second from Washington University in St. Louis, had a breakthrough doing research conducted on kidney disease in the 1990s that resulted in the drug Zemplar. (Full disclosure: this author has lectured at both universities, and served as a visiting professor at Washington University in the mid-1990s).
Although apparently federal research money was involved, since the Bayh-Dole Act was enacted in 1980 it is possible for universities and their researchers to share in the fruits of patents….
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