We haven't really talked on this topic much, but Joint Inventorship is an interesting topic to explore. What does it mean when you're racing to invent something against someone else and you both patent your invention at the same time? When you're both working on the same thing and your competition patents it before you? These are the questions many inventors face everyday when they know they are working on something that is also getting worked on by many other inventors across the world. Joint Inventorship let's you patent something that multiple people worked on so you can all take credit for it. However, back in 2000, this didn't quite happen for Dr. Rubin and Dr. Gusella.
In a classic race to discover something new and get patented/published, although Dr. Rubin won the race, he didn't turn out to be so lucky. When he identified the IKAP Gene mutation as something that caused Familial Dysautonomia, he sent his article to the American Journal of Human Genetics to get it peer reviewed. However, they sent it to Dr. Gusella, Rubin's known competitor. When that happened, Gusella realized the position he was in with his competitors information and filed a provisional patent in early 2001. When Gusella was approved for his patent, Dr. Rubin sued under 35 U.S.C. §256, saying that he should be a "join-inventor." As it turns out, since they never directly worked together, there wasn't much leeway for Rubin to explain himself as a "joint-inventor." And that is exactly what happened -- the court dismissed the case since there was no evidence of collaboration.
I think it is unfair to Rubin who spent just as much time as Gusella on working to identify this gene and then when he did, he got it swept it away by shady antics. I am just curious as to why Rubin doesn't get any credit for it since he was getting it published and I assume eventually patented, but didn't because of a mistake by the AJHG. It is also quite disheartening to see how intense competition is to the point where someone will do something like Dr. Gusella, even though Rubin had discovered the IKAP Gene mutation first. Hopefully this doesn't happen to me or anyone I know in the future.
Wow that's pretty unfortunate. Perhaps the court threw out the case because they saw this whole ordeal as Dr. Gusella's fault; confidential material shouldn't be published in a peer reviewed journal.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I'm thinking too... why did the Journal have to send this confidential information to his competitor??
ReplyDeleteVery interesting and informative topic Adam. I do think it is pretty unfortunate to Rubin. He should definitely get the credit he deserves. I know this is pretty hard to stop this problem but hopefully technology in the near future will prevent those problems from happening again.
ReplyDeleteThis is the problem I have with the transition from first to invent, to first file; it opens up the exposure of IP theft. IP theft is pretty easy, and this encourages the behavior, which is really unfortunate.
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