Intellectual Property and the Lab

Considering the title of this blog, I think you can guess that I'm going to focus mostly on McSherry's article (well, book chapter) about scientific research and intellectual property. But before I get into that, I naturally have a few complaints with this week's readings. Primarily, my complaint is that I didn't go to law school. Moreover, I don't go to law school, either. Therefore, having to read four different chapters out of law textbooks (or at least four chapters clearly written by lawyers) is extremely difficult. When I was talking with one of my friends about this, they jokingly asked "having trouble with the Latin?" I very honestly answered them that no, corpus is a word that I know; it's the English words that are causing me trouble. Pelletier had to establish a "boundary" for her case. So she's calling the county surveyor? Or is she Tom Sawyer-ing someone into building a fence? Fact vs. artifact? How does a gift even apply here? Sadly, this article and the Brown article on native art were the most understandable of any of the articles, but that still didn't make them particularly easy to understand. I know that I received a response to some of my earlier blogs that some articles are intended to be more challenging than others, but this week was absolutely ridiculous. Boyle has been around for a long time, and I would almost be willing to bet that he's published some articles on intellectual property (note: articles, not book chapters) that are actually written for the general public and don't require such a large degree of legal knowledge a priori. (See? Told you I know enough Latin to get by.)

So, now let's talk about intellectual property and the lab. I'm just going to put it out there at the beginning: while I don't agree with bringing issues like this to the courts, I agree with most of, if not all of, Pelletier's claims. I've spent about two years total in graduate-level research labs. I was entrusted with quite a few processes, techniques, and research paths that would be considered "trade secrets" within the community, because it's stuff that we in the lab wanted and needed to know, but that we didn't want others outside the lab knowing. With that being said, in most of the labs in which I worked, we really didn't care who knew what we were doing. In my most recent position, we were working with complex intermetallics (quasicrystals is the word that is most often associated with the field, but that was only a small portion of our group's work). Within these intermetallics, I personally was working on finding balances between simple structure types and complex structure types. I won't go into details of what these are, because I have a feeling no one reading this blog is really going to care/know what I'm talking about. But the point I'm trying to make here is that I can basically tell anyone what research I was doing because no one else is doing this type of research. Sharing this "proprietary" information doesn't hurt the lab at all, because there are extremely few people in the entire world who have the equipment to reproduce our experiments and even fewer who have the interest in doing so. Now, I realize that this is a public blog, and as such I'm not going to go into details of exactly what ratios of elements I was mixing, or of the specific structure types that I was pursuing. Compare the publicness of this blog with the publicness of the chemistry department at UW-Madison. It's very different. I could and did discuss with my classmates exactly what I was doing in the lab, especially because I thought it was really cool that I was working with gold and platinum (I held several ounces of platinum in my hand at one point...very awesome). I had no worries about them using my information, because they didn't have the equipment to do so. Further, there was an unspoken agreement that they weren't going to go talk with one of our few competitors across the world and tell them what I was doing. It was quite interesting that I didn't have reciprocity with some of my classmates. One of the main reasons was that they had colleagues in the same building who were in fact competitors for their research, working on similar projects. I suppose all of this boiled down to a question of how much harm it could do in sharing our information, and whether it could fall into the "wrong hands".

Now, who did I care about getting access to my information? Believe it or not, the technicians who installed the x-ray diffractometer in our lab. These technicians traveled to all sorts of other institutions to service their diffractometers...including the labs of our competitors. How does this relate to the case talked about in the readings? Well, this would be like giving our information to someone at a business, who is interested in making money. Our competitors may not be interested in making money, but they're definitely interested in beating us to publishing something. Plus, we were doing something completely novel to the field, so we didn't want to give them any hints about what we were doing until we had time to make sure it was going to work and publish our initial findings. Why do we care about this? For the very reasons cited in the paper: publishing your work first really does afford you more prestige within the field.

One last comment about Pelletier's arguments: I too was doing crystallography in my work. However, mine was with metals. To form crystals with metals, all you have to do is cool them down slowly from a molten state (circa 700 or 800°C). With proteins, however, the crystallization process is orders of magnitude more difficult, so I applaud Pelletier for her ability to do so. Her comment that ammonium sulfate is only one of a large number of options to aid crystallization is also very true. It's not in the first 5 salts I think of to try; it might show up in my first 15, but that's only a maybe. Mostly because sulfates tend to precipitate things, and even though precipitation produces a solid, it doesn't produce a crystalline solid.

I apologize if I waxed too scientific here, but I think I expressed my point. The value of scientific data (or techniques) rest in keeping them secret until you're ready to publish them. They shouldn't be shared with just anyone, and those people with whom they are shared are under an unexpressed understanding that it's not to be shared freely with other people. Pelletier may have pursued an unusual path to get her problem resolved, but she brought up some very good points about "ownership" of scientific information and its value.