Faculty-founded companies

Faculty-founded companies led universities to question how deeply involved in the commercial enterprise a faculty member should become while maintaining his or her university affiliations (228,415,5 11). In recent years, some universities have banned faculty equity holding in firms that support the faculty members own research, while others have relied on faculty disclosure of such financial interests and a case-by-case consideration of their appropriateness (51,331). 

In the 1980s, many faculty in the life sciences founded companies with products or services based on their own research (445,450). Some early products based on biotechnology (such as diagnostic tests using monoclinal antibody technology) had a relatively fast R D period, thus... 

During the 1980s and early 1990s, there were little or no official university regulations at most institutions regarding faculty participation in or sitting on boards of start-up companies they founded. Much of the concerns since the middle 1990s arose from... 

Walter Gilbert (1932- ) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Cambridge University in 1957. He then joined the faculty at Harvard University as professor of physics, but bis research interests soon shifted to biochemistry. While still carrying out his academic work at Harvard, he founded Biogen, one of the earliest commercial biotechnology companies. He received the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his development of DNA sequencing methods. 

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