What is a patent? On the surface, it is simply a way to secure and defend your intellectual property, by describing it precisely and registering this description with the federal government. But the process is often more complicated than that. For one thing, you have to convince the patent examiner that your idea justifies a patent, and this requires you to be able to communicate what the invention is and why it is novel to someone who is not an expert in your field. As Bob Franza, CSHL scientist and co-founder of Protein Databases, Inc., puts it: “the patent is a pedagogical instrument. You have to teach the patent examiner. People who don’t understand that should never even get into the notion of writing patents. A patent is a pedagogical tool. No patent examiner is going to know a field and another field and another field, so you have to teach them. It takes a lot of effort to do that, to do it well.”
