ABSTRACT
December 1980 was a watermark for American university technology transfer. The events of that month changed expectations about the commercialization of academic discoveries and set in motion new institutional policies and cultural changes that are still ongoing and unresolved. On December 2, 1980, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a patent to Stanford University entitled Process for Producing Biologically Functional Chimeras (#4237224). The patent covered the recombinant DNA (rDNA) technique developed by Dr. Stanley Cohen of Stanford University, California and Dr. Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco. At the time it was unusual for patents to be issued to a university discovery under research funded by the federal government. Indeed, the practice was for any intellectual property right to revert back to the federal government with each university able to petition the federal funding agency for permission to patent – an inefficient and cumbersome policy. But all this changed with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act on December 12, 1980 (P.L. 96-517), 1 which granted universities ownership of intellectual property from federally funded research and obligated them to engage in practices to promote commercialization. The congressional testimony in support of the change was motivated by the perceived lack of American competitiveness and a desire to produce greater return from the significant public funding that had contributed to the prominence of American research universities. At the same time, American universities were searching for new revenue streams and ways to demonstrate their relevance.
