Here is a letter that I sent to Dr.Yong-Cheng of Kansas State University on March 6th(a week ago)- to which I have so far had no reply:

Dear Dr.Yong-Cheng

I am addressing this communication to you, whose name appears first on the following online document:

US patent issued July 25,2006 "Resistant Starch Prepared by isoamylase debranching of low amylose starch

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7081261-claims.html

Could you explain to me how you were able to take out a patent on a procedure given that is intrinsically the same, except for differences in detail, to one that I published over 20 years ago in the open literature?

Berry,CS (1986) Journal of Cereal Science 4 301-314

"Resistant Starch: Formation and Measurement of Starch that Survives Exhaustive Digestion with Amylolytic Enymes during the determination of Dietary Fibre."

In that paper I described experiments in which low-amylose starches were gelatinized, incubated with a source of de-branching enzyme (pullulanase), then heat-processed, cooled and dried to produce products with high levels of enzyme-resistant starch. The technology you describe was essentially of my creation, yet I receive no mention whatsoever in your patent application. It's as if you are claiming my findings as your own, in which case some might consider you and your colleagues to be guilty of intellectual property theft.

Regards

Colin Berry (Dr)

Antibes

France

(previously Head of Nutrition and Food Safety at the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association, Chorleywood, UK (now part of the Campden and Chorleywood Food Research Association)

Reply,finally, March 13, from Dr.Yong-Cheng:

Dear Dr. Berry:
I am out of the office and have limited internet access and no access to some information I would like to read and confirm before I reply you.
I'll try to give a considered response your e-mails when I return next week. However, if you consider this a legal matter, maybe my colleagues and I are not the right people to response because the company owns the patent, not me or my colleagues. Please let me know about this. I could share with you my thoughts but I am not the legal person to answer the question in your previous e-mail. Thanks.

Best regards.

Yong-Cheng

My reply to the above (same day):

Dear Dr. Yong-Cheng

I am pleased to hear from you at last.

Yes, I recognize that the patent is owned by your commercial sponsors, and they will no doubt be prepared to defend it legally against the charge that the patent was (in my opinion) awarded on the basis of faulty and incomplete documentation. I believe that the latter was seriously misleading in at least one place as to the provenance of the key technology.

However, it's too soon to be passing the buck: the patent application was clearly drafted by you and your fellow academic colleagues whose names appear on the patent. That is why my complaint was addressed initially to you, the first author . You and your co-authors have succeeded in convincing the US patent authorities that it was you who devised a novel procedure for manufacturing enzyme-resistant starch in quantity. That was despite the essential technology being in my 1986 Journal of Cereal Science paper. All you have done, as far as I can see, is to scale up from laboratory to production plant scale. I do not see any new principles being employed - either scientific or technological- except on minor matters of detail. In short, you have presented my technology as if it were you own - a serious breach of academic and scientific etiquette to say the least- especially as you made no reference to my original findings, which have been widely cited in the literature.

Since it is you who has introduced the matter of "legal" issues into your reply, indicating that I may have to deal with a company and its legal advisors, then I shall now spend a few days considering carefully my course of action. I shall be taking advice from interested and other parties. When I have reached a decision I shall contact you again, as well as the co-authors of the patent application- if I can find their addresses- as well as your commercial sponsor.

You might not agree, but I consider that you and your fellow patent applicants should have approached me or my ex-employers in the first instance, inviting us to be co-applicants on the initial application for a "master" patent.

Yours sincerely

Colin Berry (Dr)

PS All my correspondence on this matter will be placed in the public domain (ie on my personal blog), since it raises important international issues re the commercial exploitation of intellectual property.

Update: Friday 14th March

If Dr.Yong-Cheng googles "yong-cheng kansas", he will find this post at the top of the list of returns.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=fr&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=yong+cheng+kansas&btnG=Rechercher

It occurs to me that there is one word that sums up the essence of my dispute with that individual and his colleagues: plagiarism. I shall be adding some more thoughts in due course on the subject of plagiarism - which I consider one of the deadliest of sins in the world of academic research.

Update Saturday March 15th

Received the following email from Dr.Yong-Cheng (to which my considered reply will appear here in due course).

Dear Dr. Berry:

As I indicated in my previous reply to you, National Starch and Chemical Company owns the patent.I was an employee at National Starch when the patent was filed.Other inventors also were employees at National Starch.

Because of my previous employment agreement with National Starch and potential legal issues, I have been advised that this patent matter must be handled by the company. Please communicate any issues you have with Ms. Karen Kaiser (copied), patent attorney at National Starch. I hope you understand that I care about my reputation as much as you do.

Best regards.

Yong-Cheng

Saturday: 2nd update:
As a holding reply, I invite Dr.Yong-Cheng to enter * Berry debranching * into a Google search.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=fr&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=berry+debranching&btnG=Recherche+Google&meta=

The first 4 returns ( and later ones too) all refer to my 1986 paper, the one that he and his co-authors omitted to acknowledge in their patent application.

Now look at the way in which Dr.Yong-Cheng et al referred to my work in their patent application:

"Surprisingly, it has now been discovered that completely linear, short chain alpha-1,4-glucans which are highly crystallized result in a starch which is resistant to amylase digestion."

"It has now been discovered..." !!! "Surprisingly"!!!!

Update Sunday March 16th

This ex-blogger spent a fair amount of time yesterday, trying to think up a catchy title for the issue that he has stumbled upon - one he will be reporting on here for some time to come.

I finally decided on "predatory patenting". Note the obligatory alliteration. Googling the "new" tag confirmed, as always, that others have got there first:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=fr&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=predatory+patenting&btnG=Recherche+Google&meta=

That suggests that the tawdry practice it represents has been around for quite a while. But how many people know that universities are now providing tenured academic posts to "predatory patenters" as a means of boosting their income? Let that serve as a warning to any blue sky academics who attend conferences to trade ideas with those whom they assume to be fellow seekers after truth. They may find on casual googling a year or two down the line that their ideas, including those published in the open literature, have been used without their knowledge to win lucrative patents for the applicant, with scant recognition, if any, of the originator's ideas or intellectual property. Incidentally, I was never a "blue sky researcher", working as I did for an industry research association, at the interface of commerce and academe. At the risk of introducing a commercial taint into my 1986 paper on resistant starch (RS), I alluded to the potential for supplementing bread and other baked products with RS as a means of boosting the dietary fibre(DF) content:

"One effect of adopting a legally binding definition of DF in terms of NSP (non-starch polysaccharides) would be to downgrade, arbitrarily, the contribution that baked cereal products, notably white bread, make to estimates of DF intake. Another consequence would be to destroy any incentive for food manufacturers to explore possible ways for raising levels of RS in processed foods as a means of generating extra dietary fibre."

So you see, I was no innocent abroad when I wrote those words, back in 86, but there are opportunist predatory patent applicants, 20 years on and more, who seem to think that they can treat me as one now, presumably because I'm retired. When challenged, they take refuge behind the legal departments of the rich corporations who employ or sponsor them. Well, they seem to have forgotten one thing: the power of the internet, especially Google , to throw the spotlight on their grubby underhand practices, ones that rob scientists of the recognition, and possibly financial reward, to which they are entitled for their discoveries.

Expect to find more here later on those predatory patenters, who, driven by the prospect of making a fast buck, both for themselves and their sponsors, file patents based on discoveries that are not their own.

Update Tuesday 18th March

"Creativity at mercy of intellectual pirates" is the headline of a feature on the BBC website today.

Here's a passage from the article:

Copying a person's ideas or products without their knowledge is known as intellectual piracy.

Intellectual property covers a number of things like patents, designs, trademarks and copyright.

Keeping ideas safe

Stephen Selby, who is the Director of Intellectual Property for the Hong Kong Government feels it is important to keep ideas safe.

"It protects the fruits of people's invention or creativeness, so that they can earn money from the things that they have done," he said....

Intellectual property accounted for around 40% of the growth of the US economy last year and in Britain it was around 10%.

Why 40% in America and only 10% in the UK? Are we really less creative than our US cousins? Our share of Nobel prizes, calculated per head of population, would suggest otherwise.

Maybe there's a simpler explanation: the predatory get-rich-quick ethos that now exists on American campuses allows anyone to file and win patents on other people's inventions. Those other folk remain blissfully unaware, especially when they don't even get an acknowledgement in the patent application, carefully written to make it seem as though it was the applicants' own work.

There are now rich rewards for hijacking other people's published work: fancy academic titles, fat research grants from industry (which may include the previous employer under whose auspices one filed the plagiarising patent).

There is now an overpowering stench of financial self-interest from at least one mid-western campus I could mention. See recipients' research awards, dated just over a year ago.

See also the IPbiz blog for "patent competition in Kansas"