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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (56849)	10/3/1999 1:27:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

The other telephone guy was Elisha Gray -- Western Union. Hard to believe that A. G. Bell would pay to know what was in a patent application filed ten minutes late. But ask Chris is he knows of a patent official who has been charged and convicted? Remember Stanford was a a private school misusing money from the government for a yacht. There were other abuses, however, like Southern Illinois charging the President's house to overhead. In both of these cases, I think they are close accounting calls, which the universities had to give in on, because if it insists, the government always wins these cases. They are institutional frauds, if anything, and not individuals profiting from the deal. I disagree. One rarely hears of fabricated research results. The ethical disputes deal with misinterpretation -- within the range of possible variation. There are other problems with misappropriation of research -- which have terrible costs because of patent law (only the inventor can be awarded a patent). But you see far more of this in private industry than in government, if only because private industry invents more stuff and makes profits off of their patents. Personally, I would like to see a lot more corruption in government research, people stealing ideas and commercializing them. I believe governments would discover many more patentable ideas if the workers could steal them and cash in on them. In my old lab we used to invent all kinds of great stuff and publish it (give it away) because the university didn't split the take with us. The best stuff we ever did was patented by the inventor who spent his worklife unsuccessfully trying to get paid for it instead of inventing something else.