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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> No reason that recently graduated PhD/postdoc can't start a company built on their work.

Except for the minor problem that any IP generated through their work is owned by the university. And if the IP's valuable, it typically flows straight into the hands of Flagship, Polaris, Third Rock, & co. The professor might have a say in what happens to the IP, but the students and postdocs have zero leverage with the TTO. And how could they? They are replaceable cogs in the machine (and often in the US on a student/work visa) - Bob Langer is not.

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I won't go down the pharma IP rathole, but I don't think this problem is intractable. There are many inventions that aren't CRISPR where TLO is happy to have the student who invented it run with it. Funding is a much bigger limiter than IP in my experience.

> There are many inventions that aren't CRISPR where TLO is happy to have the student who invented it run with it.

And my original point was that Paul Buchheit's request that "If you know great scientists solving important problems, please encourage them to apply" was unrealistic. YC isn't going to get the crème de la crème of scientists or scientific innovations - they're getting what's discarded by the TTOs.

To be more precise, nobody's going to get the top scientists (they're going to go right back to their labs) and the biotech VCs are going to get the top innovations (for which they often have an informal licensing option with the inventing professor before the academic research even begins). There's a record amount of funding in biotech right now, but why spread it evenly? Might as well just run dozens of trials in parallel for therapies derived from a single technology.

You do seem to have it all figured out. I'm glad YC is running the experiment, guess we will need to see how it plays out.

I apologize if I sound overly negative, but I have expended significant time and energy exploring this idea maze (http://cdixon.org/2013/08/04/the-idea-maze/), only to hit one dead end after another. I left for greener pastures (software), but I wish you and the rest of the YC biotech founders the best of luck.

Yeah it is a little ugly in pharma particularly. But I'll take the good luck :) If you come through Boston happy to give you a Ginkgo tour sometime.

>Except for the minor problem that any IP generated through their work is owned by the university.

Some Universities don't automatically claim ownership of any IP you create there.

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