Years ago, while visiting a university department I met with an elderly professor of chemistry to discuss a particular project. Among the documents I had prepared were several patents – which were actually more to the point of the meeting than any of the academic peer-review papers in the set. I was quite dismayed when the guy all but refused to touch these documents and, when he finally did browse them, to hear him exclaiming at almost every other page: “Lies! All Lies!” It was evident that he did not even bother trying to assimilate the content, he was reflexively reacting to patents as such.
Cynically, one could say here: Well, what’s wrong with you? Failed to get your own patent application past the examiner’s desk? Excluded from the list of inventors where you thought your contribution merited it? Holdout in a pocket of academia where people believe that applying new scientific insight to anything but the advancement of “pure science” is inherently suspect? Have a headache day?
But of course this would miss the real issue, which is that almost everything in the patenting system simply brushes many academics against the grain. Compounding that, twenty-some years ago it was actually possible to get certain types of life science and medical patents without ever having to show substantial hard data in support of your extensive claims. In many applications that did include data, these were of a type and quality that nobody in his or her right mind would have dreamed of submitting them to the most obscure backwater peer review journal. But in some cases you could still manage to get a patent off it, which not only gave its assignees the right to exclude others from commercial exploitation, but also gave credit of scientific priority to those named as inventors – a preposterous situation for scientists who worked in the respective fields without cutting corners.
However, H.M. Pharma Consultancy’s growing annotated patent databases clearly show two things: that this irksome situation has essentially resolved during the past two decades; and that even in the 1980s and before, the majority of intellectual property documents did show substantial supporting data, at least to the point where there was a clear rationale and where the substance of the patent could be retraced and reproduced by third parties.
I have not experienced another episode of the “Patents – liars!” type since, and for all I can tell the academic loathing of patents is abating. In terms of scientific honesty the patent record is now about as clean (or as blemished) as the peer review record. More than ever, mining information from patents now means tapping an underused information resource that looks at technical and scientific progress from a perspective that emphasizes improvements over the state of the art. These may be incremental but for the most part they can be put to practice with relative ease. Much os this never appears in the peer review theatre, or only much later or implicitly. Helping to access this resource is part of what H.M. Pharma Consultancy does.