Are we patenting nonsense?

A recent news article in Nature has asked some uncomfortable questions about India’s patenting plans. Council of Scientific Industrial Research (CSIR) is India’s largest research organization funding 38 national laboratories across the country. For many years they did nothing. Traditional Indian natural products like turmeric and neem were patented by US firms which woke up Indian scientists to harsh reality. Eventually they fought and got the patents revoked.

When Ragunath Mashelkar took over as its head, he also brought a culture of patenting with him. He encouraged patenting anything that the CSIR laboratories invented that passed the basic criteria without considering whether the discovery has any economic value.

This drive has resulted in a large amount of patents, between 2002 and 2006 there were 542 US patents — more than the total number granted to CSIR’s counterparts in France, Japan and Germany combined. It seems like a good idea to patent everything and then think about which ones can make money for us, but the costs involved are high. Each US patent costs $25,000 for filing and $4000 annually for maintenance and many patents are not worth that much money like a US patent in 2002 by CSIR of cow urine extract claiming to enhance activity of antibiotics. This has not been proved by any peer reviewed study till now.

This smells dangerously of our country’s inclination to parcel pseudo-scientific/religious ideas as science. Remember the college degree courses in Astrology by UGC started by Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi and the general acceptance of Vedic mathematics?

This patenting overdrive is also seen in the Indian Patent Office also. In the fast moving field of biotechnology, CSIR filed more patents that any other companies. In the year 2004, CSIR filed 202 patents while BASF has filed 88 patents, Novo Nordisk 79 and Procter and Gamble 55.

But Mashelkar has a different take on things. He says "There is a clear sign that the reverse flow in technologies has begun from India to the West. In the new IPR regime, the country will not be found lacking in the field of frontier technologies. We have been doing great research work thus far at our labs, but we had lacked the industry-institutions networking. That is happening now." referring to the fact that CSIR was in top 50 US patent applicants in 2002.

But there are good points also, Masheklar points out to a cluster of three US patents on a potential anticancer molecule has been licensed out to an Indian entrepreneur in the United States for around $100,000.

“Considering that only about 3% of US patents are ever licensed, it is too early for the CSIR to expect big returns” he says.

All this costs money, and the strategy of ‘patent first and think later’ approach my Mr. Mashelkar seems like we will end up spending a lot of money patenting utter nonsense. The IPO should have tighter regulation and someone should tell Mr. Mashelkar that no one is giving prizes for number of patents but it’s the quality and promise of licensing or application that matters.