Wurtman says he and other MIT professors discovered in 1971 an amino acid called which small doses, secretes the hormone serotonin and thereby induces sleep. He says he thought this would be a good cure for insomnia and widely published the results.

But Wurtman says that since MIT did not patent the drug, no one else was allowed to do so, since only inventors can patent a product. A consequence of the lack of a patent, Wurtman says, was that no one could perform safety studies on the amino acid.

Wurtman says health food stores began selling tryptophan as a nutritional supplement and sold it for 15 years without approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In 1988, Wurtman says, a Japanese company made a new bacteria to synthesize tryptophan, but the bacteria also produced a new toxin. Thus, when the drug was sold in health food stores about a month later, 45 people were killed by a disease caused by the new toxin.

If MIT had patented the drug, some company would have developed it and it would have needed FDA approval, Wurtman says. Then, when the manufacturer changed to the Japanese company, the FDA would have done new tests on the drug.

"The fact that we didn't patent it makes us responsible," Wurtman says.

Wurtman says he therefore founded the company Interneuron in 1988 with MIT as a part-owner for the sole purpose of licensing drugs for which MIT owns the patent.

"If a university patents discoveries, it doesn't go any place unless a company licenses it," Wurtman says. "To my knowledge, there are only one or two drugs ever to come out of Harvard teaching hospitals."

"I agreed to set up the company to license MIT patents to do clinical testing," Wurtman says. But he adds this is not a conflict of interest because the company must compete for MIT patents; the company does not automatically receive patents.

"Very few professors are really involved in developing products," Wurtman says. "Great research is done in the university, but very little of it is applied. There are two goals: knowledge for knowledge's sake and solving problems. I don't see them in conflict."

The Regulations

MILLIPORE

Nearly all professors interviewed say they avoid issues of conflict of interest by fully following disclosure rules.

"There is always a possibility of conflict of interest," Wurtman says. "The way I deal with it is I always tell everybody everything--more than they want to know."

Each arm of the University has different policies dealing with outside professional activities and the possibilities for conflict of interest, but for the most part, the regulations are all similar to those of the FAS.

New government regulations require recipients of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to file a disclosure form with the Committee on Professional Conduct's subcommittee on conflicts of interest, according to Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and chair of the subcommittee.