Patenting and US academic research in the 20th century: The world before and after Bayh-Dole

The dramatic growth of patenting and licensing of publicly funded research by American research universities in the closing quarter of the 20th century has stimulated some of the highest-profile debates in science and technology policy today. The issue of what aspects of academic research should be public – and what private – lies at the heart of each of these debates. The movement of academic scientists into commercialisation of discoveries and inventions has been extolled by some as a new model of academic research, one which facilitates economic and social returns from universities. At the same time, this trend has been criticised by others as representing a socially inefficient ‘privatisation’ of academic research and as a threat to the ethos of science itself. This paper places these debates in historical context, with a review of changes in American universities’ patenting policies, procedures and practices throughout the 20th century, an assessment of the logic underlying the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, and an overview of its effects on economic returns from university research.