Patent Wind Behind the Nobel Prize

Nanjing Hua News: As one of the oldest awards in the world today, Nobel Prizes, especially natural science awards, are often recognized as the most outstanding achievements in their fields, and they are difficult to be influenced by economic or other forces. However, the patent factor has repeatedly played an important role in the hard-to-shake Nobel Prize selection. This problem is highlighted by predictions made by analyst firm Thomson Reuters ahead of the announcement of this year's Nobel Prize in natural sciences. In the field of physiology or medicine, the research and development team of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology has become the most popular. However, the patent dispute between the two teams of the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been pending since 2012, making this major scientific and technological innovation that changed the world miss this year's Nobel Prize. If there is a dispute over the ownership of the patent right of a major scientific research achievement, how should the Nobel Committee consider this factor when selecting it? The patent issue behind the Nobel Prize is worthy of in-depth discussion.

The natural science awards of the Nobel Prize focus on rewarding major discoveries or inventions, while the patent system focuses on protecting innovation and realizing market value. The positioning of the two is inherently different. The reason is that knowledge is a public good and technology is not. The Nobel Prize focuses on the contributors to knowledge, not the creators of technologies and products that result from the discovery of knowledge. The former focuses on spiritual rewards, while the latter guarantees profits by patent monopoly. Take Tu Youyou, a Chinese scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year as an example. He found that artemisinin is the first to treat malaria, and how to effectively extract it is the second. As evaluated by the academic community, the Nobel Prize rewards the first person to generate an idea, not the first person to practice it.

For researchers, the patent system is an important guarantee for the income of their innovation achievements. However, the ability to make valuable inventions and innovations depends on rigorous scientific literacy and selfless research spirit. Professor Ding Zhaozhong, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, once emphasized that the most important thing for people who do science is interest. It is very dangerous to do science for fame and gain. The patent system is not the case. It is linked to market value from the beginning, and value can only be maximized if it is truly put into the market. In this way, the Nobel Prize and the patent "parted ways" in terms of values ". Although in recent years, scientific discoveries and their extensions, that is, practical technology products have also won Nobel prizes, such as blue light-emitting diodes and integrated circuits, but this does not change the original intention of the Nobel Prize. What is most illustrative is that in the pharmaceutical field, which is most closely related to patent protection, the Nobel Prize values scientific discoveries in physiology or medicine, not the specific drugs that result from it.

According to Nanjing Huaxun US patent, in fact, the Nobel Prize has been tied to the patent since the day it was born. It was Nobel's own explosives and patents that enabled him to accumulate a huge wealth and set up the Nobel Prize with $9.2 million of his inheritance as a fund. Nobel Prize and patent, for basic research and applied research and development, the two go hand in hand, different positioning, different functions. Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin, but did not carry out patent protection, so that foreign pharmaceutical companies with more industrial advantages can use artemisinin technology for profit at will. For researchers who "emphasize papers and neglect patents", this is a vivid teaching lesson. Intellectual property protection is an important part of the transformation of scientific and technological achievements. With revolutionary inventions and creations, it is even more necessary to achieve effective technological transformation under the patent system in order to truly benefit human society.