Word: transferals
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President Bok said he rejected the plan because it might have compromised academic pursuits by mingling them with financial goals. Faculty members expressed widespread opposition to the idea on similar grounds. The proposal represented the first formal attempt to involve the University in technology transfer, the process by which inventions get from the laboratory to the marketplace...
...beginning, there was confusion. The money managers were neophytes in the world of "venture capitalism": the academics had never heard of "technology transfer": and almost no one could pronounce "dioxyribonucleic acid" or say anything substantive about it, Nonetheless, the prospect of garnering desperately needed funds came close last fall to luring top Harvard administrators to trade University patents for shares in a fledgling genetic-engineering company involving a senior professor in a key role. After seeing through dollar signs to the practical and academic questions concerning the prospect of going into business with a faculty member, President Bok announced that...
...inclination on resources to pursue one of the plans? How would the University look if it played midwife in the birth of a flop? These seemingly obvious questions would have to wait; as one source explains it, "None of them had any professional experience with patents or technology transfer, but they thought they could do it better than everybody. People just don't behave rationally around money...
...pointed out then that the University had not helped launch companies with other scientists such as molecular biologist Walter Gilbert, whose Biogen Inc, S.A. had been operating for about three years.) But instead of presenting the Ptashne case straightforwardly, administrators chose to cloak it in the framework of "technology transfer," thereby cluttering the consideration at hand. Consequently, when the Ptashne case sunk, it unnecessarily dragged an issue of crucial importance to the future of the University and society with it, in the minds of many observers...
Technically, the Ptashe case did involve the concept of "technology transfer," a buzzword indicating the process by which discoveries and inventions made in university laboratories are brought to the marketplace. The clarification of federal patent regulations in recent years has given universities the incentive to ferret out potential patents and to license them to developers. Toward this end, Harvard established a Committee on Patents and Copyrights (CPC), which began work in 1977 under the chairmanship of Henry C. Meadow, dean for planning and special projects in the Faculty of Medicine, and which, according to executive director Stephen H. Atkinson...