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Reconsidering Renormalization

Stability and Change in 20th-Century Views on University Patents

History of Science Department at Harvard University, metlay{at}fas.harvard.edu

Contemporary polemics and scholarship tend to portray post-1980 research universities as exotic, abnormal, or ‘new’ because they embrace private intellectual property. This paper examines this sense of ‘newness’ by comparing two discourses - the university patent policy debates of 1910-39 and the Bayh-Dole debates of 1976-80 - and focuses on the interpretive flexibility of four institutions or tropes: ‘intellectual property’, ‘the university’, ‘the university inventor’, and ‘the public interest’. I argue that ‘intellectual property’ meant roughly the same thing in 1940 and 1980. However, ‘the university’ and ‘the university inventor’ changed subtly to accommodate a dramatic shift in the meaning of ‘the public interest’, which (by 1980) reflected the notion of a nationalized economy and a concern with federal deregulation. This suggests that the ‘newness’ of the contemporary research university has little to do with Merton’s norm of communism.

Key Words: academic capitalism • Bayh-Dole • intellectual property • renormalization • technology transfer

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 36, No. 4, 565-597 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0306312706058581


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