Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
provisional patent and. after formally offering it to any government agency that funded the research - which
usually declines - they will start hawking the IP about to see if any entrepreneurs or companies want to
license it. Priority in your IP is protected at this stage, and you can now go ahead and publish if you wish, but
eventually you may proceed to full (or utility) patent, where property rights are wrapped up more securely,
and, while IP lawyers make fortunes from litigation about who in fact owns the property, basically the matter
is now in the domain of formal law. If the university does manage to license the IP, you will get perhaps 35
per cent of the royalty stream. Or, if that's not enough for you, you can cut yourself free from academia and
take your chances with the venture capitalists as an independent entrepreneur. - Steven Shaplin, (University of
California at San Diego), London Review of Books, 6 March 2003, p.14.
31
"Monsanto aim to control the world food supply", [London, Channel 4 TV. "DNA the story of life", 19:00,
15 March 2003] see also for example the website www.cryptome.com for the current applications of
surveillance technology.
32
L. Cranswick, "The potential power of 'software patents' to destroy crystallographic software",
Crystallography News, (84), (March 2003). http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/maths/software-patents/
33
J. Sulston and Georgina Ferry, “The Common Thread: A story of science, politics, ethics and the human
genome” Bantam, (2002).
see the review of this by Robin McKie, The Observer 3 Feb. 2002. at www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/ (search
for McKie).
Apparently J. D. Watson told Sulston “Venter wanted to own the whole genome the way Hitler wanted to own
the world”.
34
There are some 900,000 lawyers in the USA. In Japan, with a different social structure there are only
18,000. Science is now done with lawyers looking over your shoulder.
35
Richard Semon (Munich) had proposed “
mnemes
to be the preserving principle in the interaction of organic
events” and this idea was promoted by Ernst Haeckel.
36
Karl Marx, as a young man, wrote his doctoral thesis (presented
in absentia
at the University of Jena) on a
comparison of the philosophies of Democritos and Epicurus.
37
"religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo"; I. 932.
38
R. Brenner, "Towards the precipice: the crisis in the US economy", London Review of Books, 25, (3), (6
Feb. 2003); Chalmers Johnson, "Who's in Charge" (Review of Daniel Ellsberg, "Secrets: A Memoir of
Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers), (LRB same number: see the London Review of Books website
www.lrb.co.uk ). E. Hobsbawm, “Age of Extremes: The short twentieth century 1914-1991”, London, (1994).
39
See, for example, Chapter III of "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" by Emmanuel
Goldstein, (1949).
40
War also is being privatised as Eisenhower's 'military-industrial complex'. In 2001 expenditure on military
research and development was: (in millions of dollars) USA 39,340; (total EU 9,100;) Britain 3,986; France
3,145; Germany 1,286; Italy 291; Spain 174; Canada 121; Netherlands 65; Turkey 50. (Economist, 3/5/03).
The total US expenditure on defence is about 340,000 per annum.
41
M. L. Sifry and C. Cerf, “The Iraq War Reader: History Documents, Opinions, Simon and Schuster, New
York, 2003.
42
As I write (in London in July 2003) the crisis over the death of the principal British scientific expert on
biological warfare, who found that the scientific situation was misrepresented by political leaders, exhibits the
problems of the relationship between science and politicians. “What is truth said jesting Pilate, and would not
wait for an answer” Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
