Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

The Bayh-Dole Act is passed.

1980

The Story of The Patenting of Life
LLP
MHT
GEN
HISS

Prior to this act, all inventions created with federal funding were owned by the federal government to discourage commercial production.

The Bayh-Dole Act encourages universities to compete for patentable inventions, which shifts the economic landscape of the academic world and rapidly increases the patenting of new insights in molecular biology. It also leads to an increase in the patenting of human genetic material, such as the patent obtained by Myriad Genetics on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA 1 and 2) in 1994.