geneva

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, is stepping up its technology-transfer activities in response to pressure from its 19 member states.

Industrial awareness: CERN training will include business studies and intellectual property rights. Credit: CERN GENEVA

The Geneva-based laboratory has created a directorship for technology transfer to oversee an expansion of its training programmes for young scientists and engineers and of its patenting activities.

The changes are being implemented by CERN's director-general Luciano Maiani, former president of the Italian particle physics organization INFN, who joined CERN last year. The INFN also has an action plan of its own to promote technology transfer.

CERN has appointed a director of technology transfer, Hans Hoffmann, who will take up the position in June. The laboratory puts 1,000 young scientists each year through its doctoral and postdoctoral training schemes, and Hoffmann estimates that more than half of them move immediately into industry, mainly to take up jobs as information scientists.

The laboratory will now offer these people additional courses in entrepreneurship and intellectual property rights, to encourage them to start their own companies when they finish training.

It will also keep a sharper eye out for patentable inventions. CERN has been criticized in the past for failing to profit from important inventions such as the World-Wide Web, which was developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee during his six-year stay at the laboratory.

The laboratory has filed only a handful of patent applications in its entire history, says Hoffmann. It has operated on the basis that, as a basic research organization, all information and discoveries should be made freely and immediately available. Hoffmann says this will continue to be the case — but that the publication of some information may be delayed until decisions have been made about patent filing.

CERN is also sensitive to concerns of its member states that the licensing of patents should be fairly distributed between them. Some members, including the United Kingdom, have complained that patents taken out by former CERN director general Carlo Rubbia were transferred to a company in Spain, without allowing other countries to put forward any interests of their own. The patents related to technologies involved in Rubbia's so-called energy amplifier, which uses a particle accelerator to drive a subcritical reactor which burns highly radioactive nuclear waste to generate energy.

INFN, meanwhile, hopes to use European Union structural funds — subsidies to poorer regions — to support an industrial training scheme which it plans to launch in the summer.

The scheme, which the organization is currently discussing with industry, would employ large numbers of industrial trainees for short periods in INFN institutes in the south of Italy.

INFN president Enzo Iarocci comments: “We will maintain our identity as a basic research organization, while responding to pressure from industry to ‘give something back’.”