Synthetic Gene Patents and Promoting Innovation

Congratulations to Dr. J. Craig Venter and Synthetic Genomics, Inc. for their breakthrough in modifying an existing cell with some synthesized genes. The news reports say that they have applied for a patent on their invention. The social goal of our system of patents is to reward innovation in the hope of improving our society. Improvements come in small steps, building on what is already available in nature or from prior inventions.

The innovation of Synthetic Genomics builds on the cells already available in nature for free. If a patent is granted for this innovation, it is only appropriate that the inventors enjoy the rewards of their hard work. However, to keep the process of innovation going, it is also important that the results of this innovation become available for free for subsequent improvements by others.  Future innovators should not have to pay for building on Dr. Venter's innovation. I hope that the Patent Office will be careful to give the same free ride to the future inventors that Dr. Venter has enjoyed on nature. Otherwise, we would have granted a legal monopoly on millions of years of accumulated achievements of nature to the first inventor, and end up strangling, not encouraging, future innovation.

Wall Street in Corn Fields

Derivatives in corn fields are nothing new. Futures contracts in agricultural commodities helped farmers protect themselves from variations in market prices. In March 2010, I visited Iowa State University to speak at the 25^th Anniversary celebration of its management school. A faculty friend at the university told me this story.

She was a shareholder of a biodiesel firm. It had reported a one million dollar loss on its derivative positions. She was unhappy and attended the shareholders' meeting to ask how the firm incurred the loss. She was told that the firm had hedged its inventory of biodiesel using derivatives. She asked for a more detailed explanation and accepted the offer to meet the firm's risk manager after the formal meeting ended. The twenty-something risk manager took a few shots at explaining the hedge by trying a few times, and failing, to illustrate the hedge by drawing a freehand chart on paper. Unable to explain the derivative positions the company had taken as an exercise to protect it from the risk of variations in price of biodiesel, the risk manager threw up his hands and blurted out: to tell you the truth, the guy from Goldman told me to do this. A director of the company who was kibitzing on this conversation turned to my friend and asked: are you in hedge funds?

I had thought the boiler room and bucket shop operations were made illegal and closed long ago. Deliberately chosen complexity, beyond the comprehension of their targeted customers, seems to be a common theme between those old-style scams and the new-fangled ones. ProPublica report on Magnetar, issued a week before the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman Sachs with fraud, was an eye-opener for me (read or listen at http://www.propublica.org/feature/all-the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble). Are we teaching the skill, and granting degrees for it?

Who Will Teach In Indian Universities?

Indian universities face the problem of talent and money. The garden of higher education in India has been left largely untended for over fifty years. When I have the opportunity to speak at Indian universities, I ask the students: Who would you like to be taught by "people as smart as you, or less so?

The students giggle, smile, even go red in the face, and someone would give the polite answer: We would like to be taught by people smarter than us. The inevitable next question is: How many people in this room filled with young talent plan to take up teaching as their work? Rarely a hand goes up, and if one or two hands do go up gingerly, they elicit derisive laughter, and those hands, too, promptly go down. It is a huge problem in India.

I ask vice-chancellors and deans about the ratio of average compensation for their fresh graduates and teachers and I get a number around three to five in favor of students. The government doesn't have the money and our friends in business think they can make money by delivering higher education. No Indian university stands among the top hundred in the world. Nobody in the world has yet found a way of delivering quality education without large subsidies from either government or business.

There is a widespread misconception in India that quality higher education can be delivered at a profit. How many of the businessmen setting up these shops will send their own children to schools which make profit? Only about 16 percent of my university's revenue comes from student fees. Yale is a private university. In India, people in teaching business seem to earn more than 100 percent of their expenses from student fees.

I suspect the source of this impression in India may be the conception of the essence of higher education being the bricks and mortar, and not the brains. Contrast this with the Vishwa Bharathi concept of higher education where one could sit under a tree and still learn and think of great thoughts. Attracting the best minds of each generation to teaching and scholarship is India's challenge.

I am glad to see that the current government in India is beginning to pay some attention to this long-neglected challenge before the system collapses for the lack of sufficient high quality talent in academia.