SPEAKER_04

It really followed on the work of this guy, Richard Mulligan, who'd also been a postdoc with David Baltimore, who developed what was called the 3T3-based retroviral production system.

And he developed it in Paul Berg's lab at Stanford.

So there's a lot of sort of, you know, interbreeding here.

But the problem with that was it took three months.

So I had brought with me a cell line called 293T that I introduced to the lab and said, hey, maybe we could use this to make viruses quickly.

I won't go into the details of why, but we could do it in three days rather than three months.

And so that now, I mean, tens of thousands of labs use that worldwide.

It probably generates the most money for me every year over any of my other inventions just because Stanford, rather than patenting it, licenses it.

And licenses are forever, whereas patents have a 17-year lifespan.

So Stanford made a good choice there.

But then people, I mean, they eventually learned.

I wouldn't say that it's the way that people think anymore.

But there's still a little bit of a... I mean, you shouldn't walk into the lab thinking I'm here to make money.

Yeah.

And so Stanford in the early days set up very clear lines about once you start a company and you license the patent or the idea to the company, you can still be involved with the company.

But there's not a pipeline of technology now from your laboratory to that company.

So they set up, you know, an oversight board for each of these companies.

licenses that make sure that you know the students are not being abused you know because you don't want students you don't want to be you know covertly getting your students to do something that then you're gonna walk behind a back door and then hand it hand over the company yeah you know so you know there's but it's it's so interesting that there's often very much a lot of worry that that's going to happen

But frankly, more often is the case that the company doesn't need the inventor anymore.

In fact, I can't tell you the number of times that once the company is set up, they want nothing more to do with me because they have their own thing to do.