The 41st National Organic Symposium starts 7 June, 2009, in Boulder at the CU campus. I’m trying to decide if I want to go bad enough to pay the admission price. The registration is rather pricey- $400-425, depending on your membership status. The symposium features a lineup of some of organic chemistry’s top rock stars and illuminati.
The whole fandango begins with a homily by Bobby Grubbs on what else? Metathesis. Good lord. I don’t think I can bear to see it again. I wonder if he’ll disclose the patented art during his talk? (These guys never point out that the cool and useful stuff is tied up in claims!)
I popped into a few web sites of the various rock stars who will be presenting. I noticed that Dale Boger is selling his lecture notes on-line for US$120 for a CD. Fancy that.
Apparently, he is still working on Vinca alkaloids. Buried in the Boger website is a graphic showing the various and complex compounds that his groups have prepared. It is pretty amazing, really. But it is as much an indication of what generous funding and hordes of rabid post-docs and grad students can provide as anything else. Boger is listed as an inventor on 25 US patents (with Scripps as assignee) by my count. Scripps owns a bunch of Boger technology. I wonder if any of it is commercialized? I don’t know the guy, so I don’t want to be too obnoxious here.
If an advisor is patenting the work that a student is doing for her/his dissertation, how do they manage the notebooks (i.e., disclosures) and the meetings with the students committee? If the student is helping to develop IP for someone else, are they decently paid for it? Does the student have multiple notebooks for confidential and “public domain” work? What kinds of liability does a student have in terms of proprietary information after they graduate? Lots of sticky issues for a fresh graduate.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
You have definitely hit on some touchy issues, Gauss. I have not personally observed it, but a few lucky folks (and they should know that it was luck as well as the brains and hard work – there are lots of folks out there with brains that work hard) have struck gold. Thus, others believe they might also do so and pave the road with worthless patents.
I worked for a guy named Larry in San Antonio who hated Bogers guts, but that had more to do with scientific disagreements.
I certainly am tempted to make the pilgramage. But not for the big names – no, to see others – hey – like Gauss!
You should come out to the symposium. Dig up some of that money you have buried in the back yard and fly out.
I never thought about the grad student/IP issues before. They could get nasty, especially in assigning the rights over to the institution. For most employees of corporations, that is taken care of before you even get an employee number, but I don’t recall ever signing such documents when enrolling in grad schools. Did I forget? Have things changed?
The obvious out is for the rulers to declare that all of the inventing was done by the advisor – the student merely reduced it to practice and therefore is unworthy of inventorship.
W.A Little at Stanford/Physics proposed room temp organic supercons consisting of chromophore-substituted polyacetylenes with electron-exciton coupling (compared to BCS electron-phonon coupling),
Phys. Rev. A 134 1416 (1964)
Phys Rev . B 13 4766 (1976)
Phys. Rev. B 67 092502 (2003)
Said polymers were safely beyond any hope of synthesis for empirical evaluation. Bob Grubbs’ olefin metathesis with ethylene extrusion (ROMP) on
H2C=C(chromophore)-C(chromophore)=CH2
(from methylenation of the benzil) is a trivial entry into said polyacetylenes. Add mer sidechains for solublity and liquid crystal ordering for spinning (re Kevlar). Somebody should look.
(hydrogens and pi-bonds omitted)
I used to work for a private research center in Mexico, at which we were encouraged to reach out for students at different universities so they came to get their phd’s from us. Disclosure and confidentiality issues made it very hard for us making the corporate office support the idea so in the end it was easier to just drop it all together.
From the very start we were told the students wouldn’t get a sallary but a (rather very) small stipend, which to me as a recently graduate seemed just awful since the company was billing millions of dollars a year!
On the academic side, I would have never thought of selling lecture notes online! I guess its kinda the same idea behind charging for a book or (in some cases/countries) for a library card. Knowledge is not always for free (should it be? that’s debatable.) Anyway, those notes are probably now somewhere in a torrent site.
PS I just recently found your blog and I’m enjoying it quite a lot. Congrats!
“:I don’t know the guy, so I don’t want to be too obnoxious here.”
I did. He’s a class A- Pr**K.
As you mentioned the students sign assignments to TSRI (the Scripps Research Institute). How an essentially private institute that’s more a factory than a campus can hand out degrees is beyond me.
Here’s the skinny:
1)TSRI Get’s substantial research money from NIH and other public grants.
2) TSRI Claims tax exempt status
3) TSRI then SELLS it’s technology rights on its discoveries (for big $$$) to private companies such as Sandoz and J&J
-There’s been a quite a bit of scandal here. Supposedly the ‘investors’ in TSRI are only to receive rights to the work they directly support. But you can easily see how a grant for a 5 million dollar NMR could be co-opted by investors who use it as ‘common equipment’.
The people who get royally screwed are the true inventor post-docs and students who have their virgin ideas plundered for near zero pay or credit.
TSRI is a HIGH stress, corporate facility that bears almost no resemblance to a normal academic institution. Students and post-docs go to TSRI to grovel at the feet of science’s high priests. Students behave as employees rather than traditional students.
I would never hire a graduate from TSRI. Only sociopathic demented types thrive in that environment.