There's a fascinating article in this week's New Yorker by Malcom Gladwell, called "In The Air," that makes a compelling case that scientific discoveries very frequently occur in multiples, i.e. instances where several scientists independently come to the same discovery. Examples include Newton's and Leibniz's independent discover of calculus, and the independent invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. An interesting corollary of this observation is that eponymous discoveries are also very frequently named for the wrong person. From Gladwell's article:

The statistician Stephen Stigler once wrote an elegant essay about the futility of the practice of eponymy in science that is, the practice of naming a scientific discovery after its inventor. That's another idea inappropriately borrowed from the cultural realm. As Stigler pointed out, "It can be found that Laplace employed Fourier Transforms in print before Fourier published on the topic, that Lagrange presented Laplace Transforms before Laplace began his scientific career, that Poisson published the Cauchy distribution in 1824, twenty-nine years before Cauchy touched on it in an incidental manner, and that Bienaymé stated and proved the Chebychev Inequality a decade before and in greater generality than Chebychev's first work on the topic." For that matter, the Pythagorean theorem was known before Pythagoras; Gaussian distributions were not discovered by Gauss. The examples were so legion that Stigler declared the existence of Stigler's Law: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." There are just too many people with an equal shot at those ideas floating out there in the ether. We think we're pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we're pinning tails on donkeys.

Stigler's Law was true, Stigler gleefully pointed out, even of Stigler's Law itself. The idea that credit does not align with discovery, he reveals at the very end of his essay, was in fact first put forth by Merton. "We may expect," Stigler concluded, "that in years to come, Robert K. Merton, and his colleagues and students, will provide us with answers to these and other questions regarding eponymy, completing what, but for the Law, would be called the Merton Theory of the reward system of science."

I certainly came away from the article believing even more strongly in the Boldrin-Levine contention that intellectual property rights just aren't necessary when you have the shoulders of giants to stand on.

The ever valuable Research on Innovation has its latest issue. There is a discussion of software patents: has the sky fallen? I'm not sure that it is a good argument in favor of patents that they don't cause the sky to fall, by the way. And there is a discussion of Petra Moser's latest research into 19th Century patents: what is striking is even where patents were available, they weren't so much used in that "golden age of patents."

Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property highlights:

Choose: patent quality or continuations?

Cecil Quillen argues that the patent bar can't have it both ways: unless the Patent Office restricts continuing applications, patent quality will inevitably suffer.

Have the courts already fixed the US Patent system?

Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft, recently suggested that history might be repeating: during the late 19th century, growing concern about patent "sharks" lead to calls for patent reform. But the courts, not the legislature, made changes to patent law. Brad stated that the Supreme Court today has already made most of the changes that Microsoft was seeking in legislation. Jim Bessen argues that if history is really repeating, then we should see a decline in litigation. That is not happening, at least not so far (see below).

Eric Maskin wins Nobel Prize

One of the winners of this year's Nobel Prize in economics has done some important work on patents and innovation.

Patents more often in lawsuits

Not only is the absolute number of lawsuits increasing, but the probability that a patent will be in a lawsuit continues to rise.

Systems biology--the use of software models that produce outputs acting like living organisms--holds great promise for the pharmaceutical industry. Four drug firms are part of a group using it to learn the effect of new drugs on the heart.

The prospect is that this approach can speed up the drug testing process. A British firm, e-Therapeutics, says it can test the effects of a new compound in two weeks, compared to the usual two years.

Testing can go beyond this though, to assay alternative therapies, such as herbs and clinical nutrition, and possibly to determine the causes of diseases caused by genetic and environmental factors.

Here is the article, "All Systems Go", from The Economist.

Slashdot is on a roll today pointing to also to this Ars Technical article

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has announced that it plans to begin an investigation into several companies that either make or use certain hard drives. In a statement issued yesterday, the ITC said that the hard drives in question are alleged to infringe on patents owned by California residents Steven and Mary Reiber. The two filed a complaint with the ITC in September, saying that the importation of the hard drives violates section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

But the good news is that if not for the prospect of being able to halt all imports of hard drives, we wouldn't have had this great invention in the first place.

Can't we just get rid of the patent system?

Considered in this paper , mentioned by Tyler Cowen at marginal revolution .

The author evidently accepts the idea of a natural right in ideas. Does he consider that the market can provide an appropriation mechanism which is sufficient to stimulate the innovations that would be elicited by prizes?

Of course, prizes are part of the market insofar as they are privately funded.

Here is Tyler Cowen's recent talk at Google, in which he discussed prizes vs. grants.

In the 1960s Donald G. Stein wondered why female but not male rats recovered from brain injuries. His key finding, that the female hormone progesterone could heal brain injuries, challenged the scientific establishment and its group think mentality. Pharmaceutical companies couldn't be bothered to conduct R&D without the prospect of a patent, so they weren't interested. He got no government grant until 1999, which didn't kick in until 2001. Even the NIH ignored him at least until recently, although this might have been a good thing. A 1,000-patient study is in the works.

The Wall Street Journal reports the story today.

After a brief hiatus TIIP (TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Newsletter) is back. Great postings on patent lawsuits; Ken Arrow's views of innovation; Patent peer review; international court forum shopping; and generic drugs.

Via Kal Raustiala a nice New Yorker article about innovation and copyright in the fashion industry. And now for the test: is Larry Lessig right? Does only money matter when iit comes to making law? Or do ideas count? If we see Congress push through copyright for fasion, I think we can conclude that Larry has it right.

Informal "protection" of the incentive to innovate in magic tricks is discussed in this paper . No IP monopoly required.

The pointer is from Tyler Cowen at marginal revolution .

Yes, I am working on a trick to levitate the Patent and Trademark Office. I'll let a real magician, like David Copperfield make it disappear.