The Farm and the Valley…

The slang name for Stanford University is the “Farm”. And of course it begot the enriched Hi-Tech entrepreneurial giant we call Silicon Valley. I missed it when it came out, but here’s Ken Auletta’s fine New Yorker piece on the relationship between the two.

Most importantly this is a superb profile of Stanford’s President, John Hennessy as he has dealt with all of the recent challenges to Higher Ed in the steroidal environment of Palo Alto. A worthwhile read.

The P300, Neurotechnology and the Military

Here’s a thoughtful piece from the Chronicle on the connections between neurotechnology, neuroethics and the military. Prominently mentioned is the so-called P300 (EEG positive deflection at 300 milliseconds) that correlates well with brain recognition of a rare visual stimulus (think seeing your grandmother’s face in the middle of 500 sequential presentations of face images).

The P300 is an evoked potential the jumps out of averaged EEG recordings time locked to the delivery of stimuli. Of greater interest to me as a neuroscientist is the un-averaged EEG activity–much more difficult to interpret, but far richer in neural information.

Gaming out the fiscal cliff: Using the proceeds of the Bush taxcuts

FT’s James Politi has an interesting piece about how the fiscal cliff scenario is playing out in my home state of Virginia here.

But the most interesting piece of information in the article is the notion that by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire at the beginning of January, Obama may generate all the revenues he needs to replace the  dollars cut by sequestration. Is that Congressman Bobby Scott’s idea? Or is it the Administration’s game plan?

Summer in the City–time to think about IP

Summer Sunset, Key Bridge

I took the photo on the Virginia side of the Key Bridge after dinner at the Cosmos Club. The principle discussion topic was whether the economy is an unmitigated disaster or just bad. The consensus was that might be the former.

Which brings me to the topic of intellectual property in the context of academic research…

A few institutions account for the vast majority of the patent licensing revenue brought into universities here in the United States. But for those institutions, that revenue can represent a terrific supplementary stream acting as a buffer against the vagaries of the economic climate. Ideally, revenue from patent licenses can fund scholarships, research and other central missions of the university.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison’s alumni research foundation (WARF) is an excellent example of this. WARF has, over its history, returned some $1.25B to the Madison Campus while, at the same time building up an endowment of about $2B. That’s serious money.

The problem is that WARF is an outlier. For most institutions, the pursuit and licensing of intellectual property is a loss-leader. Theoretically, it should make money, but in practice, it seems not to work very well. So at one level, the question then is to learn from what WARF did right at Madison. But at another level, we want to understand what factors are driving growth globally in the IP arena and then position ourselves to optimally advantage our institution with respect to those factors.

One thing that’s certainly true. Without strong laws protecting intellectual property, even WARF would not be successful. Institutions of higher education can only create real licensing revenue streams if they can stop infringement. Strong IP laws protect faculty inventors, but they also protect the robustness of an institution as it navigates the choppy waters of today’s economic news.

I’ll continue thinking about university IP in future posts.

Teaser: Intellectual property and research at the academy

Stay tuned…I’ll be blogging extensively on this topic over the next several months.  We start out with this intriguing quote from the Journal of Higher Education:

 In fact, a relatively small number of institutions benefit from income generation from entrepreneurial activity: Since the 1990s, the 100 largest universities received more than 90% of all patents awarded, and income from patents is also concentrated in the top 20 (National Science Foundation, 2007). Indeed, Owen-Smith (2005) has detailed the presence of a “Matthew Effect” across the research institution sector with the early entrants and traditionally prestigious universities gaining further advantage through technology transfer whereas other universities fall still further behind.

The full link is here.

Thinking about efficiencies….

One odd thing about the scientific process itself: unlike industrialization, scientific productivity doesn’t really lend itself to the sort of efficiencies that drive many business texts. Which is not to say that convergent technological advances haven’t been hugely important in driving recent progress in science–particularly in science of the trans-disciplinary variety that we do at Krasnow. Rather that a central part of science success comes directly out of contemplative thinking about information/clues from the very edge of human knowledge. To be perfectly clear, a successful scientist needs to allot significant periods of time for quiet thinking.

For myself, one of my own successes in neuroscience came directly out of the realization from my thesis work that imaging metabolic rates in brains wasn’t going to be very useful for imaging learning and memory because those metabolic rates had very high between- and within-variabilities. I needed instead to image the activation of a molecule that was central to mnemonic function (think close to rate-determining) so that the experimental signal-to-noise could be improved upon. That quiet thinking led me to consider protein kinase C less than a decade after it had been discovered within the context of cancer.

But there are roles for efficiencies in science. The advent of new general purpose simulators for computational neuroscience combined with Moore’s law, make for in silico experiments that take minutes rather than weeks.

Robotics allows genome-wide analysis for a small fraction of the cost of Craig Venter’s initial success with his own DNA more than a decade ago.

There are also roles for efficiencies in the administrative support that we provide to scientists. One important consideration is the ever-increasing burden of regulations that, if not checked, can literally eat away at the time a scientist can devote to creating new knowledge. There is of course an important balance between compliance work done to protect society from scientific mistakes (of many types) and the scientific process itself (work of directed creativity). At this institute, we do our level best as administrators to shield our scientists from as much as possible of the regulational burden, by taking it on ourselves–but there are certain areas where that is not possible (such as certifying that a project has no conflict-of-interest).

A part of the life of the very best scientists is close to dreaming. New seemingly random pieces of data (and knowledge) are fitted up against conventional ideas to create novel “idea combinations” (hypotheses) which then can be tested at the bench. Dreaming has never been a good metaphor for efficiency, but it may well be pretty good for describing what it is to scientifically break open a new paradigm.