[Sci-tech-public] Harvard History of Science: March 9th Working Group Meeting Announcement

[Debbie Meinbresse]

>Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 10:21:17
>Dear Debbie,
>Could you please post the following announcement 
>to the MIT calendar?  Sorry it's a little late.
>Note that the Room number has been corrected 
>since I sent it to the sci-tech-pub mailing list.
>Thanks,
>Kara    Swanson <kswanson at fas.harvard.edu>
>___________________________________________________________________________
>The Ivory Tower Working Group will host a luncheon discussion of
>Patenting the Bomb:  Nuclear weapons, 
>intellectual property, and technological control
>     a presentation by Alex Wellerstein, History 
> of Science, Harvard University
>     12:30-2:00, Thursday, March 9, 2006 in Room 252 of the Science Center
>     Lunch is provided!  Please rsvp to 
> <mailto:kswanson at fas.harvard.edu>kswanson at fas.harvard.edu.
>
>     Practices of patenting and practices of 
> secrecy have traditionally been invoked as 
> polar opposites in literature on intellectual 
> property; the former a practice of openness, 
> the latter, concealment. But during the Second 
> World War, this truism was turned on its head 
> in the patent practices of the Manhattan 
> Project, when an army of government patent 
> agents worked to secure secret patent 
> applications for the atomic bomb and its 
> methods of production. When the aggressive 
> wartime patenting program became publicly known 
> after the war, it provoked one Senator to 
> confront its chief administrator pointedly, 
> “What is the necessity for covering the bomb 
> itself by applications for patents?” The reply 
> offered­so that the government would have 
> first-to-file status, which helps with 
> interference lawsuits­not only did not answer 
> the question of why nuclear weapons would be 
> regarded within this particular system of intellectual property, it begged it.
>     In his  paper Alex examines three 
> interconnected wartime patent practices: the 
> vigorous pursuit of title-taking patent 
> policies against contractors and project 
> scientists by Vannevar Bush; the production of 
> thousands of patent applications, in 493 
> different subject classes, covering everything 
> “from the raw ore as mined to the atomic bomb,” 
> many of which have neither been released nor 
> ever will be; and the wartime censorship of the 
> patent applications filed by private inventors. 
> The ultimate goal is to seek a satisfactory 
> answer to the central riddle: Why patent the 
> bomb? Why have the motivations for a patent 
> program, spoken of as vitally important by head 
> Manhattan Project officials, become utterly 
> incomprehensible today? The      answer to 
> this, borne out of the neglected history of the 
> wartime patent policies, lies in a 
> re-examination of two standard assumptions: the 
> openness of patents, and the secrecy of nuclear weapons.
>
>
>
>
>**********************************
>Kara W. Swanson, B.S., M.A., J.D.
>Ph.D. Candidate
>History of Science
>Harvard University
>Science Center 371
>Cambridge, MA 02138
><mailto:kswanson at fas.harvard.edu>kswanson at fas.harvard.edu
>***********************************
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