Category: Business/Technology

Global warming is a threat second only to all-out nuclear war and America has to act now, a famed environmentalist and geneticist told a Madison audience Tuesday night.

To not take action against climate change would be un-American for a country that put a man on the moon, said David Suzuki, 70, who has hosted the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s natural science series “The Nature of Things” since 1979.

Suzuki spoke to crowd of about 500 in the Union Theater as the last speaker in the 2006-07 UW-Madison Distinguished Lecture Series and got a standing ovation when he finished.

NimbleGen Systems — a Madison biotechnology company and UW spinoff that created a new way to make gene chips — plans to raise up to $75 million in an initial public stock offering.

Eleven of the universities that are the most active and successful in commercializing their inventions issued a series of suggestions last week for how institutions can best license their patents while serving the public good.

Among the suggestions: sue only when necessary; avoid licensing patents to companies that do not seriously commit to developing the inventions; be more stingy about exclusive licenses; and, particularly for inventions related to human health, find ways to carve out protections in licensing deals so that poor people and those in developing nations are not barred by patent rights from gaining affordable access to life-saving cures.

A report released Wednesday by the Association of American Medical Colleges was signed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundationâ??among other large research universitiesâ??to establish guidelines for institutionsâ?? technology licenses.

Wisconsin women, as a group, are still earning smaller paychecks than men, according to a new report. The report, issued by UW- Madison’s Center on Wisconsin Strategy and the Wisconsin Women’s Council, was timed for release on International Women’s Day on Thursday.

Universities have plumbed a rich source of cash in recent years by aggressively patenting and licensing faculty inventions, but some schools now want to set limits on the practice. An elite group–11 top research institutions and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)–have signed a pledge to take a kinder, gentler approach to licensing intellectual property. Yesterday, they released principles on the sharing of patented discoveries, urging other universities to follow their lead.

In an attempt to both inform and highlight research innovation, local business members and campus faculty gathered Friday for a stem cell symposium at the University of Wisconsin.

Itâ??s a stereotype. When the scientist finally isolates the protein and solves the age old conundrum, he yells â??Eureka!â? in a fit of joy. These days, however, that shout is immediately followed by a call to the lawyers.

The eight winners of a campus-wide competition for $3 million in Discovery Seed Grants offer an early look at the breadth and scope of the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at UW-Madison.
“The seed grants are a wonderful way to begin the program of the institutes,” said Marsha Mailick Seltzer, interim director of the institutes’ public half, known as the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), and director of the UW-Madison Waisman Center.

At least two dozen universities each earned more than $10-million from their licensing of rights to new drugs, software, and other inventions in the 2005 fiscal year, according to a survey released Tuesday night, while the number of institutions creating large numbers of spinoff companies based on their researchers’ inventions apparently dropped off sharply from the previous year.

The findings are drawn from a report on a survey conducted by the Association of University Technology Managers.

In a break from past years’ practice, however, the association did not release summary data for all colleges and universities that participated in the survey (there were 160 respondents for 2005). But it did provide selective information from the 151 institutions that agreed to have their name and responses published.