Remarks delivered on Thursday, April 26, 2001, at the 13th Annual Tulane Health Sciences Research Days Awards Ceremony.

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, ITS CONTEXT, ITS IMPORTANCE

My remarks today will focus on one aspect of our research productivity, that being how we translate laboratory discoveries in ways that have a meaningful societal impact. Technology transfer is the process of adapting the results of basic and applied research, and using those for the design, development or production of new or improved products or services. The term is well known to all of us, but I'd like to spend a few minutes tracing its evolution within the context of higher education and then talk about my vision for Tulane.

The commercialization of research doesn't entail a journey back to the distant past. In just 20 years, there has been explosive growth in this area. Universities, hospitals, and federal laboratories have become quite adept at crafting value from the knowledge discovered in the course of research. According to statistics developed by the Association of University Technology Managers' (AUTM), 20 years ago, there were approximately 30 tech transfer offices at universities across the country. Today, there are over 275. In ten years, revenue generated by universities from licensing increased by 450%, from $122 million to $675 million. Other measures of growth include a doubling of the number of patents filed by universities, significant increases in the number of agreements executed, and a trend toward establishing local companies to exploit university inventions.

How did this activity take root so quickly? The initial seeds were sown by Vannevar Bush, during Franklin Roosevelt's Administration. Dr. Bush, a former president of MIT and advisor to President Roosevelt, convinced the government that university scientists could produce new military technologies to enhance U.S. defense capabilities. This resulted in such advancements as the development of radar (MIT), control of nuclear fission (U. Chicago), and the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos (U. California).

After WWII, Bush articulated the first federal science policy. In his report "Science The Endless Frontier", he focused on national renewal through science, arguing that funding basic science was a natural role of government and recommending the establishment of a national foundation to set policies for science and technology. These efforts ultimately resulted in the formation of such federal funding agencies as the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Research became a distinguishable feature of university activity. Conducting research had very tangible rewards; grants supported endeavors that would not have been possible if one had to rely solely on university funds. In some instances, there was a progression away from the teaching institution to the research institution. Research dollars supported faculty salaries and also paid graduate students and post doctoral fellows. Academic jobs became plentiful and scientists turned down industrial positions in favor of less applied pursuits in federal labs or universities.

The result of the increased research activity was an increase in innovations coming from the research, but initially universities and federally supported labs were ill equipped to take advantage of such inventions. In the late 1960s, there were 26 different agency policies covering inventions derived from federal research. This created a cumbersome route to commercialization. Universities could not own intellectual property or license it without special permission of the government. Tulane, for example, sought a determination of rights from NIH on a few promising inventions, but this process was lengthy, fraught with red tape, and an innovation could become a wasting asset in the intervening time.

A facilitating mechanism was needed and the federal government passed two important pieces of legislation in 1980, the Stevenson Wydler Act and the Bayh Dole Act, to provide the legal basis for technology transfer. Bayh Dole was critical legislation for the university community in that it allowed us, for the first time, to own intellectual property created with grant funds. It abolished a maze of regulations and created incentives to move promising research along a commercialization track. One such incentive was the requirement to share royalties with inventors.

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