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2 Public vs. Private: “Nature Must Be Circumvented”1 In 1914, sanitary engineers in the United States formed an organization with the unlikely name “National Septic Process Protective League.” Eventually representing over two hundred municipalities, the league was established to battle the Cameron Septic Tank Company of Chicago, which had sued the cities for infringing its patented sewage treatment process. After a “long and stubborn contest in which many engineers and municipalities . . . cooperated to resist” the patents, Cameron and the league reached an agreement in 1919. Relieved that the controversy might finally be over, the Engineering News-Record praised “this remarkable league of states, cities, companies and individual engineers who have stood united in the long fight.”2 The Cameron Septic Tank case was just one of several sewage patent cases in the early part of the century in which public health officials, sanitary workers, and municipal and state engineers organized against the commercialization of science and engineering . They formed groups opposed to the patents, published detailed critiques, testified in court, and encouraged municipalities to resist the demands of patent syndicates. The conflict over patents centered on issues of public over private interests in sewage treatment, municipal infrastructure, and science and engineering more broadly. By “public,” I mean public in multiple senses, all of which contributed to the opposition to patents. Biological sewage treatment was established on research performed by public bodies in the public interest. The research was funded by the public itself, typically through municipal governments and local taxation. The research was also made public—disclosed to the broader scientific community—in journal articles, in scientific meetings, and through the movement of scientists and engineers nationally and internationally. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, scientists and engineers considered the bacterial action responsible for treating the sewage to be essentially a natural biological process. These engineers believed that as “Nature’s means or methods,”3 sewage treatment processes should belong to the public at large. Because the controversy implicated the idea of natural processes as common property, the very question of what was natural and what was artificial 46 Chapter 2 came to the fore in this context as well. Whether a sewage process could be privatized by the grant of a patent turned on the question of whether the process was considered natural or artificial. As a result, many engineers charged, inventors and courts distorted nature itself. Much of this early twentieth century opposition to patents resonates with current controversies over the patenting of software, business practices, pharmaceuticals, or research performed by public institutions. Scholars have typically dated these concerns to the late twentieth century, when developments in biotechnology and related public policy led to an increased emphasis on patents. A constellation of factors in the 1980s led to the establishment of the so-called triple helix of industry, government and university involvement in technological innovation and intellectual property . During this period the key techniques for producing recombinant DNA were developed and patented, the Supreme Court case, Diamond v. Chakrabarty permitted the patenting of life forms, and the U.S. government passed the Bayh/Dole act and other legislation that encouraged researchers to file for patents on work funded by the government. As a result, governments and academia made patenting an important part of their research, and licensing and joint undertakings with industry increased substantially.4 As Angela Creager points out, though, much of the recent history of biotechnology has focused on the manipulation of DNA as the novel characteristic in the structure of the new industry rather than on the altered relations between laboratory and market exemplified by patenting.5 The sewage patent controversies highlighted those relations . These patent conflicts called into question the proper role of the scientist and engineer in society. Sewage treatment patents generated so much opposition because of the important relation between sanitary science and engineering and the public interest. A significant group of engineers worked in local and state government, on sanitation, roads, and public utilities. These municipal engineers, working for public agencies rather than corporations, were instrumental in the development of modern sewage treatment. The contrast between the public character of sanitary engineering practice and the privatization inherent in patenting produced among them a profound unease. They considered research on sewage treatment and its benefits to belong to the public and reserved particular opprobrium for municipal engineers who, despite the public nature of their work, patented the processes they developed while...

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