creativity

‘The Wall’ Cemented Pink Floyd’s Fame – but Destroyed the Band

The story of the album, which was released 40 years ago, is a classic tale of how bands struggle with unchecked egos and competing visions.

Forty years ago, on November 30, 1979, the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd released its 11th studio album, “The Wall.”

Featuring 26 tracks, two records and an opera-esque story line, the concept album would go on to become the number two bestselling double album in history. But it would also mark the last time Pink Floyd’s core members – Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright – would record an album together.

Years of touring and financial stress had taken their toll. The egomania of one member, Waters, during the recording of “The Wall” would be the tipping point.

Tensions mount

The unchecked egos of band members can often be difficult to rein in, and often lead to acrimony – to the point where the band breakup has almost become a cliche.

Tensions between the four members of The Beatles – John Lennon and Paul McCartney, in particular – famously led to the band’s breakup in 1970. Conflict between guitarist Johnny Marr and vocalist Morrissey triggered Marr’s decision to leave The Smiths. And let’s not forget The Eagles, which broke up on such bad terms that drummer and vocalist Don Henley said the band would reunite “when hell freezes over.”

Also read: Tastes May Change, but the Classics Remain: the Best Albums of 1968

By the time Pink Floyd started recording “The Wall” in January 1979, tensions had been simmering for years.

“The Dark Side of the Moon,” released in 1973, had catapulted Pink Floyd to superstardom. But the band members struggled over how to build off the success of “Dark Side” and make another hit album.

They had already fought among themselves when recording their follow-up albums, 1975’s “Wish You Were Here” and 1977’s “Animals.”

Roger Waters, the band’s bassist and co-lead singer, took charge for “Wish You Were Here.” He decided which tracks would appear and essentially dictated the album’s conceptual themes, which included alienation, a critique of the music industry and a tribute to former bandmate Syd Barrett, who had left the band in 1968 due to mental health struggles.

In the process, Waters ended up cutting the songs “Raving and Drooling” and “Gotta be Crazy” against guitarist and co-vocalist David Gilmour’s wishes.

“Dave was always clear that he wanted to do the other two songs,” Waters recalled. “He never quite copped what I was talking about. But Rick did and Nicky did, and he was outvoted so we went on.”

Perhaps feeling suffocated by Waters, Richard Wright and David Gilmour took a stab at solo albums in 1978, with Wright releasing “Wet Dream” and Gilmour debuting the self-titled “David Gilmour.”

Reflecting on his first solo album, Gilmour said, it “was important to me in terms of self respect. At first I didn’t think my name was big enough to carry it. Being in a group for so long can be a bit claustrophobic, and I needed to step out from behind Floyd’s shadow.”

The shadow of ‘The Wall’

“The Wall” would be the band’s next project – and, again, Waters asserted control.

Waters was partly inspired by an infamous incident that took place during the In the Flesh tour, which promoted the album “Animals.” Annoyed by the sound of firecrackers – and feeling as if the crowd wasn’t listening to their music or lyrics – Waters spat on the audience. He later mused about building a wall between him and his fans. The seed for “The Wall” was planted.

In July 1978, he presented a 90-minute demo to the rest of the band, proposing two concepts for the next album: “Bricks in the Wall” and “The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.”

The band members agreed to make an album focused on the first of the two. It would be about the struggles and isolation of rock stardom, and its central character would be named Pink Floyd.

The name of the character belied the fact that this would largely be a one-man show. As musicologist Allan F. Moore observed, “Waters’ growing megalomania, much in evidence on ‘The Wall,’ became harder to handle.”

Also read: The Long and Winding ‘Abbey Road’ – The Beatles’ 2019 Revival Edition

The fact that the album’s central story was semi-autobiographical, based on Waters and former band member Syd Barrett, probably didn’t help matters. The motif of walls symbolised the defense mechanisms Waters had built up against those who might hurt him – parents, teachers, wives and lovers. Some lyrics deal with the death of his father, others with infidelity.

If David Gilmour had ideas for ways to contribute to Waters’ vision, they were barely incorporated. Waters did include fragments from demos associated with Gilmour’s solo projects. But in the end, Gilmour only received three co-writing credits – for “Run Like Hell,” “Young Lust” and “Comfortably Numb.” Drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright didn’t receive any at all.

On the track “Mother,” Waters even brought in Toto drummer and session percussionist Jeff Porcaro to replace Mason. On Mason’s limited drumming abilities, Roger Waters recalled:

“It’s got 5/4 bars in it. Nick, to his great credit, has no pretense about that, it was clear that he could not play it. He said ‘I can’t play that.’ Or maybe somebody said to him, ‘Nick, maybe you should get somebody else to play this because you’re struggling.’”

The aftermath

Today, “The Wall” is considered by many to be one of the best albums in rock history. But it marked the last time the four members of the band would record an album together.

Keyboardist Richard Wright left, only to return later as a salaried sideman during Pink Floyd’s tours in 1980 and 1981. Pink Floyd – minus Wright – went on to record its 1983 album, “The Final Cut.” Waters eventually quit Pink Floyd in 1985 and sued members Gilmour and Mason in an attempt to stop them from using the band name, arguing that Pink Floyd was “a spent force creatively.”

Waters lost, and Gilmour and Mason went on to record three more albums under the name Pink Floyd: 1987’s “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” 1994’s “The Division Bell” and 2014’s “The Endless River.”

None would match the critical or commercial success of “The Wall.”

The making of “The Wall” reflects a common experience faced by many other rock bands – how creative tension and competing visions can deteriorate relations between band members.

Luckily, Pink Floyd was able to keep it all together to record one final masterpiece.

Mark E. Perry, Director of Music Industry Program & Assistant Professor of Musicology, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Like Art, Science Too Demands Inspiration

The “two cultures” division between the humanities and sciences is an artificial invention of the late 19th century.

I don’t know why it took so long to dawn on me – after 20 years of a scientific career – that what we call the “scientific method” really only refers the second half of any scientific story. It describes how we test and refine the ideas and hypotheses we have about nature through the engagement of experiment or observation and theoretical ideas and models.

But something must happen before this. All of this process rests upon the vital, essential, precious ability to conceive of those ideas in the first place. And, sadly, we talk very little about this creative core of science: the imagining of what the unseen structures in the world might be like.

We need to be more open about it. I have been repeatedly saddened by hearing from school students that they were put off science “because there seemed no room there for my own creativity”. What on earth have we done to leave this formulaic impression of how science works?

Peter Medawar. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Science and poetry

The 20th-century biologist Peter Medawar was one of the few recent writers to discuss the role of creativity in science at all. He claimed that we are quietly embarrassed about it, because the imaginative phase of science possesses no “method” at all. In his 1982 book Pluto’s Republic he points out:

“The weakness of the hypothetico-deductive system, in so far as it might profess to cover a complete account of the scientific process, lies in its disclaiming any power to explain how hypotheses come into being.”

Medawar is equally critical of glib comparisons of scientific creativity to the sources of artistic inspiration. Because whereas the sources of artistic inspiration are often communicated – they “travel” – scientific creativity is very much private. Scientists, he claims, unlike artists, do not share their tentative imaginings or inspired moments, but only the polished results of complete investigations.

The romantic poet William Wordsworth, on the other hand, two centuries ago, foresaw a future in which:

“The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us.”

Here is the need for ideas to “travel” again – which, if Medawar is correct, they have still failed to do. By and large, poets still don’t write about science (with some notable exceptions such as R.S. Thomas). Nor is science “an object of contemplation”, as the historian Jacques Barzun put it. Yet the few scientists who have vocalised their experience of formulating new ideas are in no doubt about its contemplative and creative essence. Einstein, in his book with the physicist Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, wrote:

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

You don’t need to be a great scientist to know this. In my own experience, I have seen mathematical solutions in dreams (one dream of a mathematical solution even coming to me and independently and identically to a collaborator on the same night) and imagined a specific structure of protein dynamics while sitting on a hillside.

There is a large literature on “creativity” in science, but I have found nothing that really speaks to the lack of discussion of scientific inspiration today or to the pain of lingering experiences in education that set sciences and the arts and humanities in conflicting and opposed camps.

Stories of creativity

So I set off to ask scientists I knew to narrate, not just their research findings, but the pathways by which they got there. As a sort of “control experiment”, I did the same with poets, composers and artists.

How a Wandering Mind Spurs Creativity

History is full of examples of the relationship between reverie and creativity.

Detail from The Red Balloon Paul Klee, 1922. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer was regarded by his friends as a master in the art of mind-wandering. He could become ‘enwrapped’ in his own pleasant reflections, wrote the German humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, at which times Dürer ‘would seem the happiest person on Earth’.

Many of us are familiar with mind-wandering in a number of guises: procrastination, reflection, meditation, self-flagellation, daydreaming. But while some mental meandering seems fruitful, on other occasions it has the unmistakeable bite of a bad habit, something that holds us back from reaching our full potential. Reverie can be a reprieve from reality and a font of inspiration, yes. But equally familiar is the mind’s tendency to devolve into sour and fruitless rumination when left to its own devices, especially when we’re in the grip of depression, anxiety or obsession.

Can art itself be a useful catalyst for nudging us towards more helpful emotions and mental states? Whether in the form of literature, rap or abstract oil painting many of us know we can improve the tenor of our thoughts by contemplating art. The Germans have a lovely saying for the benefits of keeping an idle (or idling) mind: ‘die Seele baumeln lassen’, meaning ‘let the soul dangle’. Now, the emerging science of neuroaesthetics is beginning to reveal the biological processes that sit behind such ‘dangling’.

To begin with, contemporary cognitive science has presented a vast amount of evidence that mental states send and receive ripples of cause and effect across the rest of the body. Think how your mouth might water when you look at a photo of a tasty chocolate cake, or how tense you feel when watching a suspenseful TV drama. Thoughts, feelings and emotions, whether aimless or deliberate, are a somatic cascade of multiple biological events. And it’s this cascade that art somehow taps into.

Galen, the second-century Greek physician, was well aware of the connection between mind and body. He believed that mind-wandering was the result of physical and mental lassitude, and so prescribed a regime of logic and hard, structured work to avoid it. ‘Laziness breeds humours of the blood!’ Galen is believed to have said. The assumption here is that concentration is a kind of psychobiological discipline, something we have to work at to stop our wayward minds and bodies from veering out of our control.

However, there’s an even older tradition from Ancient Greece that views daydreaming as a boost to our wellbeing. Galen’s Hippocratic forebears argued that mind-wandering was in fact the best strategy for guiding us back into healthy states. And modern-day research in developmental psychology has shown that children and adults who engage in certain kinds of mind-wandering actually display more cognitive flexibility, and perform better when called upon to exercise ‘executive’ functions such as problem-solving, planning and managing their own thoughts and feelings.

Neuroimaging – a method of ‘seeing’ the brain in action – has started to reveal the brain processes that correlate with these mental states. Far from falling idle, the brains of people asked to stay still and think of nothing in particular continue to fizz and pop in patterns of activity known as the default mode network (DMN). These activations are closely related to those engaged during self-referential thinking, the experience of the self, and intuition. Moreover, they are observed alongside activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – the area typically associated with those important ‘executive’ functions. Strikingly, the greater the strength of the relationship between these two domains of the brain – intuition and executive function – the more creativity a person tends to display when asked to solve a problem. Brain scans demonstrate correlation, not causation; but even so, they hint at the possibility that reverie might help to prime us to think both productively and creatively by somehow cementing our sense of self, drawing body and mind together in a train of thought and biological action.

Art can be a catalyst for this sort of reverie, as well as a tool to regulate and control it. Both the basic properties of art (whether it’s in a minor or major key; the colours of a painting), as well as the complexities of its content (the lyrics of a song, the facial expression of a person in a painting), can induce reflections and emotions—and will invariably affect our body’s physiology. Thinking creatively, and engaging with works of art, have both been correlated with DMN activity – especially when people report that the aesthetic experience was particularly strong and meaningful to them. In these moments, our encounter with art seems to trigger an autobiographical daydreaming, a flow experience with a‘ me factor’

Of course, art can also provoke unhelpful ruminative urges. Listening over and again to that song might not help you get over a heartbreak. But art-induced sadness doesn’t always make you slide into negative mental loops. In fact, art can help us adapt to the immediate source of pain by acting as a prop for emotional catharsis. We all know the strange, pleasurable, consoling feeling that comes after having a good cry. This experience appears to be precipitated by the release of the hormone prolactin, which has also been associated with a boosted immune system, as well as bonding with other people. The arts are a relatively safe space in which to have such an emotional episode, compared with the real-life emotional situations that make us cry. Even sad or otherwise distressing art can be used to trigger a kind of positive, psychobiological cleansing via mind-wandering.

History is full of examples of the relationship between reverie and creativity. Here is one, idiosyncratic example: the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) organised his library of 50,000 books with the aim of promoting mind-wandering. His collection was the kernel for the Warburg Institute in London, where we now work as researchers. Each of the library’s four floors is devoted to one of four themes – image, word, orientation, and action – and separated into sub-themes, such as ‘magic and science’, ‘transmission of classical texts’, and ‘art history’. Guided by Warburg’s ideas about what makes a good neighbour for a book, this unique approach to classification allows a withered 17th-century medical tome to cluster next to texts on mathematics, the cosmos and harmony. The shelves promote intellectual serendipity as you skip from the book (or thought) you thought you wanted, to another intriguing idea or topic that hadn’t even occurred to you.

Art appreciation is held in high esteem in most cultures and societies. It is often portrayed as a laborious cognitive exercise, but this is to forget that the arts provide an opportunity for intense emotional experiences, positive mind-wandering and psychobiological self-regulation. Dürer perhaps captures the activity of such inactivity best of all. ‘If a man devotes himself to art,’ he wrote, ‘much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.’

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Singapore To Go Easy on Exams To Foster Creative Thinking

The country isn’t about to ditch its obsession with academic excellence but a new push in the education policy marks an admission by educators that grades alone can’t guarantee success.

A student assembles a model aeroplane during an enrichment class at a secondary school in Singapore October 27, 2016. REUTERS/Edgar Su/Files

A student assembles a model aeroplane during an enrichment class at a secondary school in Singapore. Credit: Reuters/Edgar Su/Files

Singapore: Singapore‘s global rankings in maths and science have made its schools the envy of the developed world, but a new push to drive grassroots innovation is prompting local teachers to do the previously unthinkable: go easier on the exams.

The city-state’s schools now have courses with no grades, at least a tenth of admissions to universities are now based on aptitudes rather than results, and the public service is scrapping a long-held practice of classifying officers by their educational qualifications.

Singapore is not about to ditch its obsession with academic excellence and discipline, but a new focus on entrepreneurship – and notions of challenging convention – marks an admission by educators that exams alone can’t produce one ingredient needed for economic success: new ideas.

“For a long time, graduates became entrepreneurs despite the school system not because of it,” said Patrice Choong, a professor at Singapore‘s Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

At Ngee Ann, students have to develop a business, or design products, as part of their curriculum. Reaching self-imposed targets such as funding or bringing the 100th customer is key to pass, but there are no courses or grades. All they get are time and advice.

Since independence 51 years ago, Singapore‘s schools and universities have had to produce the skilled labour needed by strongly incentivised multinationals to build what is mostly a service economy.

And it worked: 15-year-olds from Singapore topped the ranks in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) triennial survey on international education in a remarkable showcase of the city-state’s social and economic progress.

There are downsides however, like other Asian societies, Singapore has its own ‘tiger mums’, who push their children to be the best in school to help set them up for the job market.

Experts say lack of play time chokes creativity. Many students attend after-school activities in the afternoon and tuition in the evening. By the time they finish homework, it’s past midnight.

This pressure has created an education arms race with the private tuition industry one of the main beneficiaries.

Parents can pay as much as 700 Singapore dollars ($491) for four-session courses and some tutors have even become millionaires from their trade.

One such millionaire tutor, Phang Yu Hon, has taught high school physics for the past 20 years but says few of his pupils end up in related fields. Rather, his clients’ main priority is to get the grades needed to get into university law or medicine.

Some of the most unhappy customers, however, are the Singapore-based multinationals, the schools were originally designed to provide talent for. A survey of over 100 US businesses in the city by the US Chamber of Commerce saw the local workforce score well on technical skills, but fare worst among Southeast Asian nations on creativity and innovation.

More than a third complained about unwillingness to take risks and a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, compared with the Southeast Asian average of 25%.

Taking risks

Cindy Khoo, a director with the Ministry of Education’s planning division, says while a historic focus on performance has kept standards high, the overemphasis on exam results detracts students from the broader purpose of learning: discovery and exploration.

“Society’s mindset also needs to shift over time, to celebrate a multitude of talent and the successes achieved via varied paths,” Khoo told Reuters.

The changes in schools are part of a broader government effort to boost innovation and technology, which also includes a commitment to invest 19 billion Singapore dollars over five years in those areas.

In its first such project, Chongzheng Primary School asked a group of its pupils to spend time in an elderly home and come up with life-improving, marketable solutions. They noticed the elderly often got lost and suggested GPS walking sticks.

The imperative to change has led to the development of ‘sandbox’ frameworks within the public space, which allow for business and policy experimentation without systemic risks in case of failure. Singapore‘s central bank, for example, also has a ‘regulatory sandbox’ for financial technology startups.

But critics say barriers to Singapore‘s culture of innovation exist not only in schools but also more widely in a political society that places restrictions on freedom of speech and rewards deference to authority.

Authorities in Singapore, a haven of stability in a politically and economically volatile region, believe such restrictions are needed to preserve harmony in a multi-racial society and have contributed to its success.

Lee Quane, Asia director at HR consultancy ECA International, says this is partly why companies complain more about the lack of innovation in Singapore than they do in Hong Kong.

“One difference between Singapore and Hong Kong is that the government is always somewhere close to you … People have been skewed away from critical thinking,” Quane said.

(Reuters)

Who Gains from the Modi Government’s Intellectual Property Rights Policy?

The new policy is clearly informed by conservative pro-IP ideology, which big capital promotes in order to gain from current developments in science and technology.

Locked and Patented: The new IPR policy seems like a gift to the US government. Credit: Jeremy Brooks, Flickr CC BY 2.0.

The National Intellectual Property Rights policy was approved by the cabinet on May 12, 2016 and released to the press a day later by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

It is a “first of its kind” policy for India, covering all forms of intellectual property together in a single framework. The policy follows a completely new set of principles that are tilted in favour of intellectual property (IP) owners in every possible way. The principles laid down in the policy incentivise IP owners by granting them monopoly rights. The policy rewards big capital without paying attention to the balance to be established vis-à-vis public interest and development. Since the government presents itself as pursuing development, it is ironic that its new policy gives very little importance to either public interest or the developmental challenges that India faces.

The policy will govern the following Acts: Patents, Trade Marks, Design, Geographical Indications of Goods, Copyright, Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights, Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Layout Design and Biological Diversity. It is expected, therefore, that it will impact sectors as diverse as pharmaceuticals, software, electronics and communications, seeds, environmental goods, renewable energy, agricultural and health biotechnology, and information and communications. The policy demonstrates a maximalist agenda (that is, an agenda geared towards the maximum possible incentive and rights for IP owners), to drive the development of industry, publicly-funded research and development organisations, educational institutions and government departments in India from now on. The policy admits that the intellectual property of foreign corporations has gained from the changes made to India’s IP laws after joining the World Trade Organisation and that the size of Indian IP is small. Even so, it continues on the same path without adducing an iota of evidence to support the assumption that a strong IP-based policy framework is essential for promoting creativity and innovation in India.

No case for strong IP

In this context, one must state with some concern that India’s rank on the Global Innovation Index, which attempts to measure performance with respect to creativity and innovation, has slipped from 62 in 2011 to 76 in 2014.

Indian applicants lead in the matter of trademark applications and not patents. The number of new drug applications filed by Indian companies with USFDA, for instance, has never crossed the single digit figure.

However, in the sphere of trademarks, out of the 1,79,317 applications in 2010–11, the class consisting of “medicinal, pharmaceuticals, veterinary and sanitary substances” accounted for 31,634 trademarks, representing 17.64%. Analysis shows that the number of Indian design patent assignees was as small as 271.33% of design patents were for jewellery and ornaments.

This tells us quite clearly that there is no point in exaggerating the scale of Indian creativity and innovation in order to make a case for IP protection. Jaitley spoke of accelerating the registration and approval of trademarks. The policy speaks of promoting IP as a financial asset and economic tool. However, policy makers need to be reminded of how the public banking system was robbed when it relied on the valuation of Kingfisher brand to release funds to Vijay Mallya.

The Vision Statement and the Mission Statement of the policy proclaim that creativity and innovation are stimulated by intellectual property for the benefit of all. The policy states that it shall promote entrepreneurship and enhance socio-economic and cultural development, including access to healthcare, food security and environmental protection.

But what is the basis of this proclamation? Did the committee set up by the ministry for the formulation of the national IPR policy sift and analyse the evidence? None of the evaluations made by the committee are clear. Had the committee addressed this question, it would not have been able to argue that the adoption of stronger IPR is necessary for the enhancement of innovation.

A strong IP-based system was not responsible for the creation of the foundational elements of new generic technologies such as software, semiconductors, microprocessors, mobile telephony, recombinant DNA technology, monoclonal antibodies and other such biotechnological tools. The same fact applies to the case of 3-D printing. For all these generic technologies, patents, designs and layouts were not applicable when the foundational tools emerged. Scientists had to be pushed to treat some of these cases as IP by the technology transfer offices of US universities.

Did a strong IP regime work for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry after the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement?

The policy does not demonstrate how a regime favouring the maximum possible incentive for IP owners and the granting of monopolies will be able to ensure the “socio-cultural development” of India. Analysis in a forthcoming publication by this author of the impact of the patents granted on new chemical entities (NCEs) for the 262 drugs introduced in India since 1995 indicates that the market power of foreign firms is on the rise due to the adoption of product patents in various therapeutic groups such as anti-cancer, cardiovascular, central nervous system, diabetes, urology and other non-communicable diseases. The data clearly reveals that the market power of foreign firms would have been greater had India opted for early TRIPS implementation, as did many Latin American countries, making their industries as well as people suffer the adverse consequences of strong intellectual property regime.

Success without IP

In fact, far more contrary evidence is directly available from the pre-TRIPS period.

The green revolution took place in India without any IP protection for the breeders of new varieties of seeds. The Indian pharmaceutical industry became the pharmacy of the Third World because of the rejection of a strong intellectual property rights (IPRs) system in the 1970s. Since the domestic industry supplies a large number of pharmaceuticals to the regulated markets of the US and Europe and is the lifeline for patients particularly in the developing world, it is paradoxical that the policy makers of the Modi government choose to do little more than give lip service to India’s global role in the case of generic pharmaceuticals. With no mention at all by them of the use of critical safeguards in India’s patent law, such as compulsory licenses, parallel imports or support for patent oppositions, it seems there was some merit to India’s assurances to the US industry that compulsory licenses will no longer be issued in India.

The policy focuses on improving the IPR output of national research laboratories, universities, technology institutions and researchers by encouraging and facilitating the acquisition of IPR. It proposes to link research funding and career progression with the creation of IPR and identifies this link as a key performance metric for public funded R&D and technology institutions. Although it is clear that the policy suggests an ambitious harnessing of intellectual property by public institutions (through, for example, the patenting or licensing of research results) and the partnering of public institutions with the private sector, it chooses not to ask the obvious question of what has been the outcome of the implementation of precisely such policies in the laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Since the mid-1990s, CSIR researchers were directed to file patents but the policy failed to yield patents that could earn CSIR revenue. A vast majority of patents obtained by CSIR (2001–2010) lie idle and have not been able to generate enough licensing revenue to cover even four to five percent of the cost incurred by the filing of patents.

The policy on patenting has not only cost CSIR money to maintain the patents in India and abroad, but also has directed it away from more important directions.

In order to generate IP that can be commercialised, the laboratories are required to plan patent portfolios without which enforceable IP will not get generated. It is not enough to celebrate the intellectual property of individual researchers. Indian patents are the outcome of non-collaborative, individual organisation-based efforts, both for industry and research institutions. According to India Science & Technology, 90% are single entity patents; in 2010, the percentage was as high as 96% for India’s US patents. Only 7% of the total patents are outcomes of collaborative R&D (Volume 3, 2015).

Even in the case of patents filed with the Indian Patent Office (IPO), a large majority (75%) were filed and obtained by individual assignees. Both R&D institutions and industry have been acting separately in their pursuits of technology development-related investments.

The same can be said of collaborations between academic institutions, universities and research institutions that have been granted patents: the trend is to “go-alone.” The Indian collaborative scenario is no different internationally. According to analysis in India Science & Technology (Volume 3, 2015), industry collaboration with universities and R&D laboratories is negligible. There have been no more than 0–10 patents in any given year. Analysis of the patent assignment database of the USPTO indicates that only 173 out of the total 2420 patents obtained during the period resulted in the licensing of other entities. Further examination reveals that 32 of the 173 patents were instances of internal trading. Just 7.15% of India’s patents were licensed on the whole and 5.83% of the total, if we leave out cases where the transfer was to one’s own subsidiary.

Flawed patent strategy

Clearly, the message of this analysis is that the Indian industry and R&D organisations are not at the stage that patent strategy is going to yield high returns. It seems that our policy-making is not informed by ground realities in India but rather by the pressure being exerted by multinationals. Multinationals and R&D organisations abroad do not treat the challenge of IP generation without a strategy. They spend money on patent litigation. Does India want its laboratories to focus on science or litigation?

Further, we must not forget that if publicly-funded laboratories are encouraged to patent their research contributions, seek exclusionary rights and make money from the private sector from their research contributions, the tax payer will be paying twice. The cost of the product will include the total R&D expenses incurred after a huge mark-up.

Why should the policy makers opt for exclusive licensing of public IP? Exclusive licensing is an important element of a strong IP system. This is a matter of serious concern. The policy proposes to establish and strengthen IP facilitation centres as nodal points in industrial and innovation university clusters. Evidence on the performance of science and technology (S&T) parks is not very encouraging with regard to IP-based entrepreneurship from India. There is a significant gap between scientists and industry with regards to important factors in the process of technology transfer from the publicly-funded R&D sector to the private sector industry. Scientists consider the lack of motivation and demand from industry for investment in indigenous technology development to be a key barrier to sustainable collaboration.

High voltage propaganda

The experience with IP-based entrepreneurship and technology transfer of the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC), National Innovation Foundation (NIF) and Technology and Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), SIBRI and BIRAC of Department of Biotechnology is hardly encouraging. However, thanks to propaganda that favours strong IP, the same mantra of IP-based entrepreneurship is being repeated. Take the case of NRDC, which manages the IP generated from the programme aimed at technological self-reliance (PATSER) of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). In royalty-paying projects, the firm paid on a regular basis only in one case. In most cases, the firm paid royalty for one or two years. The amount of royalty paid varied widely, from Rs. 954 to Rs. 86 lakhs. The most common reasons cited for non-commercialisation were that the technologies developed were obsolete and that there was no market demand for the technology developed (see India Spend & Technology, Volume 3, 2015).

The policy considers IP rights to be private rights. The policy wants to promote IPRs as marketable financial assets. The policy views IP as an economic tool. But intellectual property is a regulatory tool for the government. The government should not be using it only as an incentive. The government needs to provide safeguards for public interest when statutory monopolies are being offered to IP owners. The objectives and instruments of the policy need to be guided by a social contract between state and society on the basis of the consequences of the intellectual property regime for the development process. As a regulatory tool, the state has to ask how and what benefits corporates will deliver and what costs the policy will entail for the Indian people. A social bargain should reward or grant incentives to innovators but not without asking what kind of innovation and access to innovation is being offered by the particular system of reward. Incentive has to be commensurate with the stage of development and the quality of intellectual property. Intellectual property must maximise disclosure, diffusion and dissemination, access to knowledge, and public interest.

The policy is vague about how such a balance can be achieved and how the rights of IP owners will be implemented in a manner conducive to social and economic welfare that will prevent the misuse or abuse of IP rights.

Although the policy speaks of encouraging open source drug discovery (OSDD), it is well known that the OSDD programme is no longer being pursued by CSIR. While the policy speaks of promoting free and open source software, it could have given a genuine boost to the idea of open source in the areas of software, seeds and creative publishing if the government was willing to announce a public procurement policy for encouraging open source in software and seeds. The policy should have announced a law favouring open source licensing. Special licenses for non-exclusive dissemination of intellectual property could have been encouraged. Twenty-five countries including Australia, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary and Italy provide for legislative support to open source.

The policy also refers to open innovation as part of the promotion of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Open innovation is practised by large companies as a programme of collaborative R&D strategy and not as CSR activity. Apart from the NIF (National Innovation Foundation) which has tried collaborating with Big Bazar to market the “outcomes of grassroots innovations,” there are not too many corporate social responsibility (CSR) examples that can be used as models by R&D organisations. CSIR has many rural technologies to offer, but large companies have not been typically willing to transfer these technologies to the population that is at the base of pyramid.

Multilateral negotiation

The policy provides for the enhancement of IP enforcement agencies at various levels, including strengthening of IPR cells in state police forces. It proposes to adjudicate IP disputes through commercial courts. The policy marks a major departure from the earlier well-stated understanding of the Bakshi Tekchand and Justice Iyengar committees that guided the framing of the Indian Patent Act, 1970. The model patent act provided for the granting of rights for the use of new processes to benefit pharmaceutical and food industries and laid the basis for creative imitation or the reverse engineering approach, which led Indian R&D institutions to create over 50 new chemical reaction processes for more than 100 essential drugs.

The policy states in writing that the government will engage constructively in the negotiation of international treaties and agreements. It also states that it will examine accession to some multilateral treaties which are in India’s interest. Is this a signal that India could be party to Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) where the TRIPS-plus agenda is already in place?

The policy seeks respect for IP and, in its usual style, the present government wants this message to be taken to schools, colleges and the public. It wants to involve multinational corporations in IP awareness programmes. The policy proposes to strengthen and spread IPR facilitation centres and open up the traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) to corporates. What is of perhaps greatest concern is the targeting of the judiciary through “awareness” and “training” on an IP maximalist agenda that is likely to threaten the fine balance between public interest and IP that the courts have struggled to maintain. Contributions from publicly funded research will follow the norms of licensing of strong intellectual property. India can even join UPOV 1991, which will prevent farmers from saving and using their own seeds. Given the fact that farmers’ rights, health and access to information are at stake, the IPR policy is not in national interest.

While the stated rationale of this policy is that a strong intellectual property rights system is necessary in order to promote creativity and innovation in India, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Monopoly rights stifle radical innovation. Monopolies do not promote sustainable innovation trajectories. Barriers to research collaboration may develop. The diffusion of knowledge suffers and industry and science tend to innovate with difficulty. A strong IP system means a reduced access to innovation for the people of India.

The policy of the Modi government is clearly informed by conservative pro-IP ideology, which big capital promotes with the aim of appropriating all the gains from the progress underway in science and technology. The policy was framed by a committee whose convener is the FICCI’s IPR committee coordinator. The committee was filled with lawyers who have worked with the Finance Minister in the past and have no experience with the challenges of policy formulation. Clearly the policy has been shaped by growing pressure from the US-, Europe- and Japan-based multinationals that support strong IP system.

Western pressure?

It is no secret that India has recently been under pressure from the US government under their Special 301 law to change its patents regime. For the last two years in the conferences held on trade and investment, Ministry of Commerce officials have talked favourably about the benefits of joining the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has several TRIPS-plus provisions. These officials have argued about how it is not possible for India to keep out of “mega-regionals.”

Furthermore, the timing of this policy is extremely significant. The Prime Minister is leaving on his fourth visit to the US on June 7 and is expected to address the US Congress.

Although the policy pays lip service to economic and social welfare and states that India remains committed to the Doha Declaration on TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, this commitment is not reflected in the policy’s provisions. The policy is not devoted to using public health safeguards and biodiversity protection. Nor can one ignore the fact that the Centre has been reluctant to use compulsory licensing and improve the manual of patent examination to check the quality of the patent grant. The government has agreed to join the US government in the WTO to discuss “twenty-first century issues of trade and investment” at the time of the conclusion of the Nairobi Ministerial. According to the United States Trade Representative, the Doha Development Agenda is dead. There has been no progress. Needless to say, the IP maximalist agenda of the new IPR policy will no doubt warm the heart of the US government. It appears that the government wanted to make a gift to the US, and decided on gifting it this IPR policy. But this particular gift to the US must be taken back. It should be prevented from becoming national policy.

Dinesh Abrol is the Convener of the National Working Group on Patent Laws, and Professor at the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development

Crosstalk: Understanding Counterintuitive Science Needs a Culture of Rigorous Scepticism

For most organisms, it can be very beneficial from the point of view of their survival to form an opinion on something purely with respect to possible or apparent intent, and without trying to understand any science behind it.

For most organisms, it can be very beneficial from the point of view of their survival to form an opinion on something purely with respect to possible or apparent intent, and without trying to understand any science behind it.

The Thinker in The Gates of Hell at the Musée Rodin, Paris. Credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

We’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.
–E.O. Wilson

Last month, we had explored the persistence of pseudoscience in an ultramodern world being built on a science and technology overdrive. To a society as a whole, the implications of a population that is educated, and yet resistant to science (especially when it goes against their beliefs) can be considerable. Yet sometimes, we all know that even if science has shown beyond all reasonable doubt that a certain phenomenon is a certain way, and we are trained to use the scientific method, that phenomenon can be hard to believe it.

All of us, at some level, hold on to beliefs that are demonstrably false based on accumulating evidence. Perhaps there is a belief in anecdotal medical treatments which fail all scrutiny, or in ghosts, demons, monsters and angels, or astrology and divination. There is also an inclination to disbelieve processes that mountains of evidence hold to be true. This could be anything like the earth being flat and revolving around the sun, or natural selection, climate change and more. This is because our perceptions say that it is wrong. We are wired to see the apparent, and “seeing is believing”, as the cliché goes. In part, this is because of how our brains are built, and how we have evolved as organisms.

Palaeolithic brains for the space age

This wiring is very deep within us, and starts very early in life. The resistance is not merely limited to viewing some science suspiciously, but for many new ideas that challenge what is apparent. It begins very early in life, with what kids know and learn either by observation and mimicry, or active instruction. Children, even babies, “know” a lot by learning things themselves through observation. They know that solid objects will fall to the ground, for example, or that people have different emotions. Now suppose a child knows that any unsupported object will fall to the ground, it is difficult for this child to imagine or comprehend that the world is round. That is because they have observed that things will always fall off round objects. At a young age, a child cannot comprehend relative scales of the earth (and themselves), and relate it to the concept of gravity. It is just as counter intuitive at that age for a child to believe that a larger object will not fall faster than a smaller object of the same mass, when dropped from the same height. Many of us see that it takes many years for children to be able to accurately draw out the earth as a rounded globe. In essence, people reject scientific ideas because it appears to be counter-intuitive.

A level of resistance to science comes from cultural factors. In every culture, some information is specifically asserted or defined. For example, the resistance to understanding evolution is prominent in some parts of America, in certain religious groups. This is because it has been specifically asserted otherwise. Not everyone is qualified to study or understand all scientific principles of a subject (like string theory). Therefore, it’s typical for people to believe in what they are told by people they trust. Interestingly, many studies now show that children do the same thing, and will only believe things that are told to them by people they trust. These could be parents, teachers or peers. More importantly, when some data or explanation is contradicting when coming from different sources, children will believe an explanation provided by the people they trust and not the data itself.

All these early beliefs and actions continue throughout our lives. For many people who do not believe in something, they may have no clue about it, and cannot explain the basic concepts of the thing they don’t believe in. The disbelief is not based on any objective evaluation of facts but because of the sources they trust. These trusted sources have helped that group, community or organism survive and persist over time, and therefore their reasoning cannot be wrong. Logically, these sources should be the experts in that field. This is what adults are expected to do and yet we remain in constant conflict today with science because the sources we trust often do not have an (or are not capable of having an) understanding of the science.

In many ways, all of this comes down to us having brains wired for the Stone Age while we live in the Space Age.

Against ingrained beliefs to understand science

Much of our disbelief and resistance to counterintuitive scientific concepts, such as evolution through natural selection, is because of natural selection. For most organisms, it can be very beneficial from the point of view of their survival to form an opinion on something purely with respect to possible or apparent intent, and without trying to understand any science behind it. Let’s say you encounter a snarling lion on the road. Concluding that the lion wants to eat you and taking evasive measures is more likely to lead to your survival than sitting and observing the nature of the lion, counting its teeth, deducing if it is hungry/angry/deranged or not, or if it is snarling because it has a thorn in its foot, and so on.

This is why we have evolved with a wiring that instructs us to avoid snarling lions. This kind of selection does not require active thinking but can be strongly selected for in organisms with just single cells and no brain. Let’s take a soil dwelling bacteria that requires, say, a fruit, to grow. If the supply of the fruit dwindles, the best bet for the bacteria is to switch to survival mode and build resources to help it survive. So it might switch on all the genes and machinery in order to do so. But it might be entirely possible that in a certain region, and certain time, there will be plentiful supply of fruit for the bacteria that will come a day or two later. We might be able to say exactly when and how that will be today, but the bacteria are better off banking on a survival strategy than trying to figure out if food will be available in the immediate future.

Humans today are no longer just the hunter-gatherers of old, banking solely on collective tribal lore and bet-hedging strategies based on cultural traditions to survive. Our unmatched abilities to match patterns, recall past events, build collective memories and manufacture tools have resulted in both technological revolutions as well as a startling awareness of science that is as strikingly counter-intuitive as it is stunning. Today, our understanding of the natural world can no longer come from inductive inference and by relying on tribal instincts born of millennia of natural selection.

What we call ‘human civilisation’ itself only spans a few thousand years. This is a mere moment of pause during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and not even the blink of an eye in the scale of life’s evolution. Instead, we have to rely on that other human ability, to connect distant dots by recognising patterns, and removing what appears obvious. Indeed, all of this helped us develop the scientific method. For this method to thrive, science can no longer thrive in isolated silos. We need societies that foster this process of creativity, which means that societies that tolerate dissent, encourage rigorous debates and testing of ideas that flow freely, along with providing sufficient resources, will be best poised to transform our futures. And all along, we need to suppress the strong forces of our palaeolithic side to do so.

Sunil Laxman is a scientist at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, where his research group studies how cells function and communicate with each other. He has a keen interest in the history and process of science, and how science influences society.