Trump threatens Harvard patents worth hundreds of millions; Politico, August 8, 2025

 JUAN PEREZ JR., Politico; Trump threatens Harvard patents worth hundreds of millions

[Kip Currier: Trump's unsubstantiated and unwarranted threats to seize Harvard's patents look like another tactic out of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban's road-to-authoritarianism break-the-universities playbook.

Stand tough, Harvard!]

[Excerpt] 

"The Trump administration is threatening the status of Harvard University’s lucrative patents as it continues to engage in hardball negotiations with the Ivy League school.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared Friday that the administration is launching an immediate review of the intellectual property Harvard has derived from federally funded research grants, in what amounts to yet another display of White House power over higher education institutions...

The university defended its research enterprise and denounced the Trump administration’s tactic on Friday.

“This unprecedented action is yet another retaliatory effort targeting Harvard for defending its rights and freedom,” a university spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO. 

“We are fully committed to complying with the Bayh-Dole Act and ensuring that the public is able to access and benefit from the many innovations that arise out of federally funded research at Harvard.”

Addressing the epidemic of high drug prices; Harvard Law Today, January 5, 2024

Jeff Neal, Harvard Law Today; Addressing the epidemic of high drug prices

"The Biden administration is once again targeting high drug prices paid by Americans. This time, officials are focused on prescription medications developed with federal tax dollars. The United States government, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awards billions of dollars of research grants to university scientists each year to fund biomedical research, which is often patented. The universities in turn grant exclusive licenses to companies to produce and sell the resulting drugs to patients in need. But what happens if a drug company fails to make a medication available, or sets its price so high that it is out of reach for a significant percentage of patients?

To tackle this problem, the Biden administration recently released a “proposed framework” that specifies when and how the NIH can “march in” and award the rights to produce a patented drug to a third party if the patent licensee does not make it available to the public on “reasonable terms.” The plan is based on a provision included in the Bayh-Dole Act, a 1980 federal law which was designed to stimulate innovation by encouraging universities to obtain and license patents for inventions resulting from federally funded research.

According to Harvard Law School intellectual property expert Ruth Okediji LL.M. ’91, S.J.D. ’96, although the Biden administration’s proposed framework for using government march-in rights to lower drug costs is an important development, whether it will be successfully implemented and result in meaningful drug price reductions remains to be seen. Harvard Law Today recently spoke to Okediji, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director of Global Access in Action(GAiA) at the Berkman Klein Center, about the new proposal and the legal challenges it might face."

Nobel laureate takes stance against allowing research to be intellectual property; The Auburn Plainsman, April 11, 2019

Trice Brown, The Auburn Plainsman; Nobel laureate takes stance against allowing research to be intellectual property

"George Smith, recipient of a 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, spoke to a crowd of students and faculty about the problems that arise from making publicly funded research intellectual property.

Smith said one of the greatest problems facing the scientific research community is the ability of universities to claim intellectual property rights on publicly funded research.

“I think that all research ought not to have intellectual — not to be intellectual property,” Smith said. “It’s the property of everyone.”"