Owning and disowning invention: intellectual property, authority and identity in British science and technology, 1880-1920.

人们对科学、技术和社会的习以为常的看法最近变得不稳定了。正如英国大学化学系和物理系被广泛报道的关闭所表明的那样，不再有基础研究值得公共资金的假设。与此同时，学术科学家变得越来越有创业精神，他们抛弃了看似陈旧而稳定的无私调查理念，转而追求专利和利润。与此同时，基因组学、互联网和其他“技术科学”的最新发展改变了“知识产权”的界限，模糊了发现与发明、原创与模仿、保密与开放之间的界限。因此，人们对对公众具有重大影响的知识的所有权提出了重要的普遍关注。在关于这些关注的辩论中，历史经常被用来为‘支持’或‘反对’限制新种类知识产权所有权的自利立场辩护。明显缺乏的是那种历史视角，这种视角可能会使过去真正有助于揭示当今的担忧。因此，这个项目着眼于知识产权问题最初是如何在二十世纪之交成为科学和技术的一个主要问题的。调查科学家最初是如何摆脱对专利资金的依赖，并确实开发出替代的知识产权模式，将表明具有讽刺意味的是，我们的社会在多大程度上已经回到了鼓励技术科学家再次成为专利驱动型企业家的程度。回到公元前1900年，对于这些问题的洞察将为现在提供一面镜子，展示当时的事情与我们现在的情况是如何有趣地相似，但又具有启发性的不同。由此产生了两个具有公共重要性的主要主题。首先，一种流行的观点认为，发明一直是将“纯科学”的想法应用到实际问题中，但事实证明，这是一个原始的神话。这种关于纯科学如何激发发明的单向概念是一个非常新的现象，直到20世纪初才有可能出现。这个项目通过观察科学家和工程师如何寻求政府资助来逃避被迫依赖专利获得财政收入的问题，解释了这一概念是如何在第一次世界大战期间首次站得住脚的。第二个密切相关的主题是，强迫科学家和工程师在经济上依赖知识产权的好处--就像1914年之前经常发生的那样--可能会严重损害他们创造权威和无私知识的能力。提供这一历史洞察力的目的是为了让人们对强迫科学家以完全自筹资金的方式进行研究的优点进行辩论。最后，该项目通过考虑技术科学的三个领域来解决当今的关切，以追踪它们的早期发展如何引发知识产权问题。19世纪末最具创造性和最具争议性的技术领域是电气工程。电话、电灯和无线作为国内技术的发展，每个人都有利害关系。然而，电力的微妙的非物质特性给定义这些创新的技术特征带来了重大问题，因此谁能声称这些创新是“作者”的，就像非物质信息和软件的所有权困扰着我们同等的计算“繁荣技术”一样。获得许可的植物育种的早期历史同样预示着生物技术领域生命形式专利的兴起，而现代航空航天工程师与航空先驱一样，对公共资助研究的保密性感到担忧。因此，这个项目提供了可能有助于解决当今知识产权冲突的见解。

Accustomed views on science, technology and society have recently become unsettled. As the much-publicized closure of chemistry and physics departments at UK universities has illuminated, there is no longer a presumption that basic research deserves public funding. Academic scientists meanwhile have become increasingly entrepreneurial, turning their backs on seemingly old and stable ideals of disinterested inquiry to revert to the pursuit of patents and profits. At the same time, genomics, the Internet and other recent developments in 'techno-science' have shifted the boundaries of what counts as 'intellectual property', blurring distinctions between discovery and invention, originality and imitation, secrecy and openness. Important general concerns have thus been raised about the ownership of knowledge that have major implications for the public.In debate over these concerns, history has all too often been exploited to defend self-interested positions 'for' or 'against' restrictions on the ownership of new kinds of intellectual property. Distinctly lacking has been the kind of historical perspective that might render the past genuinely useful to inform present day concerns. This project thus looks at how issues of intellectual property originally became a major problem for science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Investigating how scientists were first able to shed their reliance on patents for funding, and indeed develop alternative modes of intellectual property will indicate the extent to which - ironically - our society has come full circle in encouraging techno-scientists once again to become patent-driven entrepreneurs. Going back to c.1900 for insight on these matters will hold up a mirror to the present, showing how things then were interestingly similar and yet instructively different to our current situation.Two major themes of public importance emerge from this. First, the popular idea that invention has always been the application of ideas from 'pure science' to practical matters turns out to be a crude myth. This one-way conception of how pure science supposedly inspires invention is a very recent phenomenon, and has only been plausible since the early twentieth century. This project explains how that conception first came to be tenable during World War 1 by looking at how scientists and engineers sought government funding in order to escape the problems of being obliged to rely upon patenting for financial income. The second closely related theme is that forcing scientists and engineers to become financially reliant upon the benefits of intellectual property - as was often the case before 1914 - could seriously compromise their capacity for producing authoritative and disinterested knowledge. This historical insight is offered with a view to informing debates about the merits of compelling scientists to pursue their research in a manner that is entirely self-funding. Finally, the project addresses present day concerns by considering three areas of techno-science to track how their early development raised problems in intellectual property. The most creative and controversial area of technology in the late nineteenth century was electrical engineering. Everyone had a stake in the development of the telephone, electric light and wireless as domestic technologies. Yet the subtly immaterial character of electricity posed major problems for defining the technical character of these innovations and thus who could claim to have 'authored' them, just as the ownership of immaterial information and software bedevils our equivalent 'boom technology' of computing. The early history of licensed plant breeding similarly foreshadows the rise of patenting life forms in biotechnology, while modern aerospace engineers share aeronautic pioneers' concern about secrecy in publicly funded research. Thisproject thus offers insights that may help to resolve today's conflicts over intellectual property.