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The coalition opposes proposed changes to government-funded research rules
A coalition leader says Washington’s efforts to lower prescription drug prices could jeopardize agricultural and other research and development of new products.
Joe Allen of the Bay Dole Coalition tells Brownfield that the 42-year-old law, backed by former senators Birch Bay of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas, allows universities to license their discoveries to the private sector to develop products and bring new products to market, but he says that the Biden administration is under pressure to change that. “We have people like Senator Elizabeth Warren and other people, progressives, who actually want to go back to the days where again the government determines who owns what things should be, what the price of things should be, and again, we used to have that, and this just doesn’t work.”
Allen says that thanks to the Boy-Dole Act, the U.S. has once again become a leader in product research and development. “Swine vaccines came out of that. Strawberries came out of it. It’s one of those things where every day of the year we have three new products and three new companies based on government-sponsored inventions that we didn’t have before Bayh-Dole. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why we’re running around China in terms of ingenuity.”
Allen says one success story of the Bay-Dole Act is the Honeycrisp apple, which was created by researchers at the University of Minnesota but is now available on the market after a decade of private sector development.
Allen says that in the 40 years before Baych-Dole passed, 28,000 inventions were on the shelf and not a single new drug had been developed. Now, he said, the US leads in all areas of technology, with three new companies emerging and three new products being commercialized every day.
Allen was working for former Senator Baych in 1980 when they discovered that inventions from government-funded university research were being taken by the government for free distribution, but because someone had to invest in creating a consumer product, many new discoveries and inventions just sat on the shelf. .
Burch Evans Bay, Jr. served Indiana in the United States Senate from 1963 to 1981. Senator Bob Dole served from Kansas from 1969 to 1996.
