Swift Hall 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
THE DIVINITY SCHOOL 
1025 EAST 58 T H STRBBT 
CHICAGO • ILLINOIS 60637 
September 21, 1976 
Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson 
Director, National Institutes 
of Health 
Bethesda, Maryland 20014 
Dear Dr. Fredrickson: 
My competence to make judgments about legal matters involved in 
your letter of 8 September 1976 is, of course, minimal. Also, 
since I am a humanistic scholar I have not had experience with 
patent claims. I am, however, exploring our university's ex- 
perience on these matters, and hope to include awareness of this 
in a subsecruent letter. 
I have to think about these matters in my own way, and what 
follows stems from that. 
There seems to me to be several general issues involved, some of 
which apply to all the research funded by NIH, and to patents 
that might be forthcoming. Then I shall have to isolate the re- 
combinant DNA matter to designate what special considerations are 
involved in this case. 
1. Since the research has been funded by the "public," the public 
has an interest in and a claim to various benefits (including 
financial ones) that are forthcoming. The funding creates an 
obligation: the investigators are beneficiaries of the funding; 
the results they achieve are "beneficiaries" of the funding 
through their work; thus there is a prior and large claim on the 
part of agencies representing the public interest to these benefits. 
This surely is assumed in the presently operative regulations about 
the issuance of patents. I take it that present policies are 
efforts to insure a fair distribution of benefits, with a kind of 
apportioned regard for the interests of various parties involved. 
The contributions of the research institutions, e.g., Stanford, 
are attended to as well as those of the public as funding agency. 
As I read your letter I perceive that other considerations of 
utility are regarded, namely the need to have production of materials 
and the required capitalization for this, and the need for con- 
trolled dissemination of information. 
It appears that the present policies and procedures are satisfac- 
tory to all parties if there are no exceptional circumstances 
involved as is the case in the recombinant DNA. Since the establish- 
ment of policies and procedures is a process of adjudicating 
legitimate interests or rights among parties who have them, that 
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