 Hi, everyone. We're going to get started. Not sure I need this microphone, but it's here. OK, so welcome, everyone, to our workshop. What should universities do with their patents? It's wonderful to see so many different people here from different sectors who think about this topic. My name is Yardin Katz, and I'm a fellow here at the Berkman Klein Center and also at the Harvard Medical School in the Department of Systems Biology. I want to begin by thanking my co-organizer, Chris Bavitz, from the Harvard Law School, and also the Berkman Klein events team who made this possible, Kerry, Dan, and Daniel. And also thanks, big thanks to John Murley and Becca Tabasky from Berkman Klein. So we're very lucky to have people from diverse sectors here. So we have academics. We have activists and people from advocacy groups, folks from technology transfer and development offices at universities, and a representative from government. And today will be, of course, a US-centric perspective on these topics. On the issue of diversity, I just want to say that when planning this workshop, we started with a list of more women than men. And due to logistics and availabilities, unfortunately, the balance tipped. And so we have many more men than women. And this is something that we have to do better in next time. I also want to acknowledge the important partners to this conversation who are not here. So we don't have representatives from public universities. For example, we have been unable to get them in other important groups. But nonetheless, I think we have a great venue for starting this dialogue, which hopefully will not end today between these diverse sectors and maybe an opportunity to also, especially later in the day, talk about potential alternatives and reforms to the current practices of intellectual property at universities. So the plan for today is very simple. We'll have short talks followed by lots of room for discussion. And we hope the discussion will be very informal and friendly. The discussions will not be videotaped. And they will follow Chatham House rules. So that means no attribution if you talk about what happened here to the outside world. Just don't attribute what you heard of the discussion to anyone. We'll have lunch in this room. So please don't go away for lunch. I promise you the Harvard Law School has the best food out of any law school in Cambridge, at least. And no, seriously. And in the afternoon, we'll have a breakout session where we kind of collaboratively answer a bunch of questions related to today's topics. And our eventual plan is to compile all the perspectives that we've heard here today into a written report with input from all of you. So I just want to start with a couple of remarks about this topic of universities and patents and universities and intellectual property. And I thought a really great starting point was Jessica Silby's observation in her book, The Eureka Myth, where she points out that intellectual property is not a natural thing. So I really like this passage. She writes, IP doesn't simply happen or arise the way a flower does after planting a seed. IP needs to be shaped and coaxed. IP is not inevitable. It does not follow easily from creative and innovative activity. And I think that we can similarly say that IP doesn't just align naturally or automatically with the university's mission, with its educational mission, research mission, or with public interests more broadly. But universities continue to generate intellectual property. And this is something that we have to contend with. And so the questions for today, as I see them, are what are the main issues or points of contention with the current practices of intellectual property at universities, whose perspectives and interests aren't taken into account, for instance? And how can these be reformed? So I want to just make a couple of observations from my corner of the world, from biomedical science. So this is a graph showing the number of NIH-funded patents through time, since the 70s till 2010. And what you can see is that it's been sharply increasing. This graph here shows the trajectory for Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. And so publicly funded research is producing a lot of patents in the biomedical world. One of these publicly funded patents is the patent over CRISPR, which I'm sure you've heard about in the news about the technique and the very public and very ugly patent battle over it. So Wired Magazine and other venues have been discussing CRISPR in very hyperbolic terms. Wired Magazine says it could remake the world, solve world hunger, provide unlimited energy. Here we have the cover of the economist talking about designer babies and the potential to edit all of our human features and complex traits using CRISPR. And front and center to this, in my opinion, wildly hyperbolic coverage is the patent battle itself, which is framed as a battle over who is the rightful inventor of this technique. And it's been framed as a battle between two sides, the Berkeley side, which is associated with Jennifer Doudna and the MIT Broad Institute side, which is mostly associated with Feng Zhang. So I think this patent is interesting because it raises a number of important problems with the current practices of universities when it comes to intellectual property. So I don't have time to go into all of the conceptual problems with this patent. I'll just briefly say that it's enormous in scope. It covers essentially all DNA editing in animal and plant cells and essentially the use of DNA editing to potentially treat any disease with any sort of genetic basis. I would go further to say it's neither an invention nor a therapy and that when you get to the bottom of it, it's an abstract thing that is being patented. But putting that aside, more important to our conversation today is I think this is an abuse of a monopoly because this patent was, which is enormous in scope, was licensed to one startup company, Editas, which was founded by one faculty member from MIT and the Broad Institute. So this enormous terrain is monopolized by just one company. And of course, advocacy groups are rightly upset about this, patient advocacy groups. For example, this group that is worried about Duchenne's muscular dystrophy is worried that their disease, which is just one of many on the list covered by this patent, will not be prioritized. And of course, no single company can treat all of the world's diseases. And even if CRISPR did have these magical capacities that the press tells us that it has. I want to just give one last example. So we're all familiar with non-practicing entities or patent rolls and intellectual ventures is one of the most notorious patent rolls out there. And they're very proud of the work that they do. So they put their portfolio online and it's available for anyone to download. So their patent portfolio contains about 30,000 US patents. And I got very interested in where these patents come from. And so I downloaded this portfolio and queried it against a patent database and asked, who is the original assignee? And what this analysis revealed is that nearly 500 of these patents in IV's portfolio originated from public and private universities. And this graph shows the number of patents from the top 10 universities in this portfolio. And unfortunately, this includes universities who signed this so-called Stanford Pledge in 2007, pledging to be mindful of working with non-practicing entities or patent aggregators. So for example, Caltech signed this pledge, but it had patents in this portfolio that were filed after 2007, so not following the pledge. And so I think this raises a number of issues. To be clear, we don't know the nature of the transfer, how these patents got into the hands of intellectual ventures. And that's something that I'm working on trying to understand, but we should think about whether this is an outcome that we want and whether universities can do something to block this. So with that, I want to go straight into the first session and we'll have plenty of room for discussion. And we're lucky to have Alex Czar from the history of Science Department here at Harvard to chair this session. And Alex tells me that he's going to be completely neutral because he lives in the 19th century. I'm not sure if I buy that, but we're very lucky to have a historian with us and his historical insights to facilitate and guide the discussion. So thank you, and we'll go to session one.