Frankenstein and “The Labours of Men of Genius”: Science and Medical Ethics in the Early 19th Century

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818, used a sprawling network of allusions to contemporary literary and scientific works, which strongly reflected Romantic scientific and literary ideology. The robust connections between Romantic artistic and scientific circles included personal and professional relationships, scientists writing literary works, and authors discussing scientific advances. The closely linked scientific and artistic community helped define science and the nature of life in the new era. Medical historians have not fully discussed the debate concerning medical ethics in this period, detailing earlier Enlightenment medical ethics and later Romantic medical developments, which more closely resemble modern scientific values. The transition period discussed in this essay has no set beginning and end, but gaps in research specific to developing medical ethics tend to occur from approximately the early 1780s to the late 1820s. Frankenstein is a conscious example of a writer critiquing prevailing scientific views of the day and the text offers historians insight into developments during this significant period of transition in medical ethics

Who\u27s Patenting What? An Empirical Exploration of Patent Prosecution

Patents are big business. Individuals and companies are obtaining far more patents today than ever before. Some simple calculations make it clear that companies are spending over $5 billion a year obtaining patents in the U.S.- to say nothing of the costs of obtaining patents elsewhere, and of licensing and enforcing the patents. There are a number of reasons why patenting is on the rise; primary among them are a booming economy and a shift away from manufacturing and capital-intensive industries towards companies with primarily intellectual assets. But whatever the reason, it is evident that many companies consider patents important. We set out to investigate who is obtaining patents in what areas of technology and what characterizes those patents. To accomplish this, we collected a random sample of 1000 utility patents issued between 1996 and 1998. We then identified a large number of facts about each of these patents. In this Article, we use this data to predict the characteristics of patents being obtained in the population as a whole. Further, we test a large number of relation- ships between these patents, such as how nationality relates to area of technology and how the size of the patentee relates to the prosecution process. In so doing, we hope to advance the under- standing that both scholars and practitioners have about modern trends in patent prosecution

Non-obviousness and Screening

The paper offers a novel justification for the non-obviousness patentability requirement. An innovation involves two stages: research results in a technology blueprint, which development transforms into a profitable activity. An innovator, who is either efficient or inefficient, must rely on outside finance for the development. Only patented technologies are developed. Strengthening the non-obviousness requirement alleviates adverse selection by discouraging inefficient innovators from doing research, but creates inefficiencies by excluding marginal innovations. We show that it is socially optimal to raise the non-obviousness requirement so as to exclude bad innovators; we also provide several robustness checks and discuss the policy implications