10 inventores que no se hicieron ricos

ORIGINAL: BBC

Redacción BBC Mundo

14 de julio de 2013

El ratón contribuyó a hacer ricos a otros, pero no a su inventor.

Hay quienes se adelantan a su tiempo.

Douglas Engelbart fue uno de ellos.


Al mundo le faltaban varios años para alcanzarlo, cuando se le ocurrió que se debía poder operar el interior de una computadora desde afuera.

Por ello, cuando su invento, ese ratón o mouse que durante décadas acompañó a todas las computadoras, empezó a estar literalmente en manos de todos, la patente había caducado.

De haber recibido lo que le habría correspondido por derechos de autor, Engelbart habría sido muy rico: al menos 100.000 millones se han vendido desde mediados de los '80s.

Engelbart, quien murió a principios del mes, no es el único inventor que se quedó sin recibir la recompensa que se esperaría.

He aquí otros 10 creadores que no llegaron a ser millonarios.

1. LEDs

Cuando Nick Holonyak Jr (1928, Illinois, EE.UU.) inventó el primer LED en 1962, predijo que algún día este diodo de luz remplazaría a la bombilla de Thomas Edison.

Los colegas de Holonyak insisten en que se merece el Premio Nobel.

Pero él, humildemente, dice: "Es ridículo pensar que alguien me debe algo. Al fin y al cabo, tengo suerte de estar vivo".

Las lámparas LED (Light Emitting Diodes) pasaron de ser luces indicadoras en aparatos electrónicos a ser ampliamente utilizadas por su brillo y eficiencia, empleadas sobre todo en grandes edificios.

clic Lea también: Y se hizo la revolución de la luz

2. Los Post-It

La empresa estadounidense 3M vende miles de millones de papeles adhesivos Post-It al año, pero sus inventores se definen como "acomodados", no ricos.

Los Post-It se siguen vendiendo como pan caliente.

Los papelitos son una creación conjunta de Spencer Silver, quien en 1968 desarrolló un adhesivo que se podía despegar y su colega Art Fry al que se le ocurrió la idea de un señalador que se quedara en su lugar en su libro de cánticos.

Inventados por casualidad, estos cuadraditos usados para escribir notas recordatorias fueron lanzados al mercado en abril de 1980 por 3M y figuran cada año entre los cinco artículos de oficina más vendidos en Estados Unidos.

clic Lea también: El Post-it cumple 30 años

3. AK-47

El fusil Kalashnikov o AK-47 fue inventado por el soldado del ejército soviético Mikhail Kalashnikov mientras se recuperaba en el hospital de las heridas sufridas en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Kalashnikov afirmó que su creación era para el beneficio de su país.

clic Vea también: El arma de guerra más usada en el mundo



4. Aguja de tocadiscos de zafiro

Marie Killick (1914 Mitcham, Surrey, Reino Unido) inventó la aguja de tocadiscos de zafiro pero no pudo obtener la licencia y tras años de litigio nunca hizo ningún dinero.

En 1958 ganó una demanda contra la empresa eletrónica Pye, pero quebró al año siguiente.

5. Aerodeslizador

El ingeniero inglés Christopher Cockerell utilizó una aspiradora y latas para poner a prueba sus teorías mientras desarrollaba el aerodeslizador, conocido en inglés como hovercraft, que cruzó por primera vez de Calais (Francia) a Dover (Reino Unido) en 1959.

Cockerell fue nombrado caballero, pero luchó por años para obtener una suma de dinero por parte de la Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo de la Investigación.

6. Tetris

El programador informático ruso Alexey Pajitnov desarrolló el famoso videojuego junto a sus colegas en un centro de investigación financiado por el gobierno ruso en 1985. Pero recién empezó a recibir regalías 10 años más tarde cuando formó The Tetris Company.

clic Lea también: Por qué el Tetris es adictivo

7. La radio a cuerda

El inventor Trevor Baylis dijo hace poco que ya no puede vivir en su casa en Twickenham, Londres, pues a pesar de que se han vendido millones de radios a cuerda en todo el mundo, la compañía con la que hizo el negocio le hizo algunos cambios al diseño y por consiguiente él perdió el control sobre el producto y las ganancias.

"La mayoría de nosotros no lo hacemos por dinero sino por entusiasmo", dice Baylis. "Yo sé que al menos dejé mi marca con la radio, las linternas a cuerda y otras cosas que inventé".

8. Máquinas de karaoke

El empresario japonés Daisuke Inoue se ganaba la vida tocando la batería en una banda que invitaba a los asistentes a un bar tomar el micrófono y cantar.

Un día que no pudo ir a un concierto puso una grabación y luego creó 11 máquinas de karaoke que alquiló. No patentó su invención y apenas hizo algunos yenes.

9. MP3

El MP3 se convirtió rápidamente en el estándar para la transferencia de música a través de internet.

El estudiante de posgrado alemán Karlheinz Brandenburg comenzó a trabajar en el proyecto en la década de 1980, pero debido a que no tuvo dinero para distribuir el software lo comercializó como shareware, modalidad en la que el usuario puede evaluar de forma gratuita el producto.
10. La red de redes mundial

Y, por último, usted no estaría leyendo esto si no fuera por el londinense Tim Berners-Lee, quien inventó la World Wide Web para ayudarles a los científicos que trabajaban en el laboratorio europeo de investigación en el CERN. Él dice que el secreto del rápido éxito de su invento fue el hecho de que lo hizo gratuito.

Muchos honores para Tim Berners-Lee, pero, nuevamente, poco dinero.

No todos los inventores se ven obligados a hacer dinero, algunos quieren hacer una contribución al "bien común", dice Tilly Blyth, encargada de la unidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología en el Museo de Ciencia de Londres.

"Tenemos la tendencia a enfocarnos sólo en los desarrollos comerciales, pero en realidad a menudo son las investigaciones públicas y de los gobiernos las que han hecho posible que lleguen a ser lo que son", dice Blyth. "Piense en el iPhone: uno cree que es un gran invento de Steve Jobs y Apple, pero los orígenes de sus componentes vitales, como la pantalla, el chip y el procesador, están en investigaciones financiadas por el gobierno".

"Gran parte de la investigación de vanguardia proviene de estudios que fueron hechos sin un objetivo concreto en centros de investigación públicos para el bien de la humanidad y no para hacer dinero", concluye.

Nobel Prize 1945: Fleming’s Series of Fortunate Events

ORIGINAL: OxBridge Biotech
by: Kate Campbell

3rd June 2013

Petri dish from Fleming’s discovery

The Story of Penicillin’s Beginning in Medicine
Serendipity – or chance meeting the prepared mind – has famously long been a part of scientific discovery, producing Newton’s theory of gravity, dynamite and the microwave to name a few. But by any standards, the discovery of penicillin relied to an improbable degree on a series of fortunate events…

The bright but blighted beginning
One September Friday morning in 1928, in a laboratory belonging to St Mary Hospital, London, an airborne fungal spore without planning or purpose landed on a bacteria-containing petri dish, left open by its owner, Alexander Fleming. Fleming, meanwhile away from work on holiday, as a consequence had unwittingly allowed time for the fungal spore, Penicillium notatum, to develop in his dish of bacteria. The fungus grew into a considerable sized growth amongst the bacterial (-‘Staphylococcal’-) colonies, but strangely contained a clear bacteria free area or ‘halo’ surrounding itself. What followed from this unknowingly fortuitous event indeed changed the course of medicinal history. On his return, Fleming observed this phenomenon and concluded that the mould must contain properties which inhibited bacterial activity by either suppressing growth or killing (-‘lysing’-) the cells.

The Scottish microbiologist consequently began work statim on isolating the mysterious molecule able to lyse the surrounding bacteria, so he could ascertain its spectrum of activity. In other words, if this fungal agent was releasing something into the surrounding environment to kill off one type of bacteria, how many other bacteria types could also be affected? What benefited enormously Fleming’s investigation was his ability to use the many techniques he had applied years earlier when he discovered another antibacterial- ‘lysozyme’- also by chance. Fleming’s experiments thrillingly confirmed that the fungus secreted a metabolite able to kill bacteria that had cell walls with sugar chains connected to short proteins –‘peptidoglycan’- on their outer surface, known as gram-positive bacteria, responsible for such deadly infections as scarlet fever, pneumonia and meningitis. He called this new metabolite ‘penicillin’.

His findings published in the ‘The British Journal of Experimental Pathology’ one year later, only attracted little attention, and after a few years of further investigation, Fleming abandoned work on the molecule. As one man, neither a specialist in chemistry nor clinical biology, Fleming was unable to overcome problems with penicillin’s isolation, stability and yield nor could he prove beyond reasonable doubt that penicillin had any medicinal value. It seemed that progress on penicillin was about to reach a premature demise. 10 years after the initial discovery was made though, by an act of fate or simple chance, Fleming’s work attracted the attention of an English biochemist at Oxford, Dr Howard Florey. By 1939 Florey had convinced his co-workers, including Dr Ernst Chain, collectively known as the ‘Oxford Group’, to work on penicillin with serious determination. By another stroke of luck, their work coincided with the beginning of the Second World War. What resulted from these two simultaneous happenings, led to penicillin only a few years after its revival, attaining the spotlight on a world-wide stage, in the form of an antibiotic viable for use by man.

The wintry war and the champion cantaloupe
By 1941 Florey and Chain had moved on from animal clinical trials to human, the Oxford Group were striving hard to transform penicillin into an effective drug for man, with sufficient strength and minimal toxic side effects. At the same time, America had entered World War II upon Japan bombing Pearl Harbour. With war-time economics in full swing, the cost of penicillin research no longer became a setback, furthermore with US and UK governments seeing penicillin’s potential to treat soldiers, suffering from possibly fatal infections such as gangrene, penicillin production became national priority.

Problems to be overcome, however, were by no means trivial. The structure of penicillin was still unknown, consequently chemical synthesis of the candidate drug was exceedingly challenging. For example, penicillin for clinical trials was in such short supply that that which had not been metabolised had to be recovered from the patient’s urine to be reused for remaining treatment. Victories quickly ensued though from untiring efforts on both sides of the Atlantic. Florey and Chain succeeded in concentrating penicillin to enhance its activity and stability. Additionally, with the collaboration efforts of the US Department of Agriculture, one of the unsung heroes of the Oxford Group, Norman Heatley, and several biopharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, large scale penicillin manufacturing methods got underway with alacrity to conquer the production bottleneck.

A world wide search had also begun to find a new strain of penicillium, able to grow faster and produce more penicillin than Fleming’s original P. notatum. The search remained elusive until 1943 in Peoria, Illinois, when a laboratory assistant Mary Hunt, forever after named as ‘Mouldy Mary’, discovered mould on a supermarket cantaloupe and brought it into work. The mould she found, P. chrysogenum, was considerably more potent than Fleming’s original strain and was subsequently used for further penicillin development to great avail. With most problems solved, except for elucidating the structure (done so eventually in 1945), the modern era of large scale antibiotic production had truly begun. By 1944, enough penicillin could be successfully prepared in quantity to treat wounded Allied forces during the Normandy invasion, D-day. Undeniably affecting the outcome of total war casualties, it did not take long before penicillin was nicknamed the war’s ‘wonder drug’. One could even argue the fortunate timing of penicillin’s discovery and development may indeed have helped secure the Allies win for the war overall.

The endless end…
In 1945, almost 20 years after Fleming first noticed mould growing in his open petri dish in London, and thanks in part to a war that had catalysed scientific discovery, Fleming, Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on penicillin. Since its medicinal inception, penicillin has saved millions of lives and revolutionised health care across the world. However the effect of ever increasing levels of antibiotic resistance should not be underestimated. Even Fleming himself had a sense of foreboding about the discovery stating, ‘The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily under dose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.’ Due to the historic incorrect and excessive use of antibiotics, today modern science is consequently fighting a new war; that against bacterial infections, such as MRSA, resistant to the armoury of antibiotics designed to eliminate them. This shift in the arms race between man and pathogen is seemingly leading to a new era of healthcare, one that doesn’t include antibiotics as we know. To successfully negate the long term effect of antibiotic resistance and navigate towards a new method of treatment, future generation scientists will undoubtedly require extreme perseverance, endless innovation and maybe just a little bit of luck.

DON’T Drop Out to Do a Startup

ORIGINAL: Christian Yang Blog

christian. Co-founder ReelSurfer (Y Combinator S12), Microsoft and Google alum, Stanford '08. Avid eater. View Full Profile →

Steve Jobs did it in 1972. Bill Gates did it in 1974. More recently, so did Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. I’m not talking about some illicit drug in vogue with the Silicon Valley elite (well,except for Jobs) – I’m talking about dropping out of college.

In recent years, dropping out to pursue a tech startup has become the new American Dream. With films like The Social Network, even mainstream Hollywood has bought into the mystique, painting romantic notions of bucking traditional education to change the world, all while making billions. Perhaps the most controversial manifestation of this trend is legendary entrepreneur and VC Peter Thiel’s Thiel Fellowship, formerly known as the “20 under 20″. This fellowship offers $100k each year to students under 20 on the condition that they drop out of school to pursue an idea. In the CNBC documentary trailer about the “20 under 20″, Sean Parker of Napster fame gives his take: “If your goal is to become an entrepreneur, it would seem that college has become a very bad place to do that” (watch the actual highlight here).

Well, I’m here to say *don’t* do it – do NOT drop out of school. Let’s start with some numbers.

The Numbers

It’s pretty easy to come up with success stories, but what proportion of the whole do they actually make up? If we use wealth as a measure of success, Forbes’ January 2012 edition reveals that about 85% of America’s 400 Richest People (shown left) do, in fact, have a college degree. The top 400 is already an elite minority, and only an even smaller minority decided to forego traditional education.

“But that’s the old guard,” you say. “We’re the new generation with new, innovative ways of doing things”. If you go younger, the trend is the same. I looked through this year’s Forbes 30 under 30 in theTech category and an overwhelming 92.5% stuck to school. Even in a fuzzy category like Art & Style, 87% had undergraduate degrees or better. You can see my compiled results here.

But what if you don’t buy this numerical argument? Innovation is about going against the odds and taking risks, after all. I still argue, though, that we need a foundation to build from, and that foundation is school.

A Skills Foundation

From a practical perspective, a tech startup needs a sufficient pool of technical skills in software, hardware, the sciences, or even finance. This is especially true for the technical founder, who on top of writing code will need to architect designs, allocate resources, and otherwise set the tone for the entire engineering team as the company grows1. More often than not, this level of skill is fostered in some sort of formal education.

But why do you need college to develop these skills? There’s an old saying that sums up my view: “You don’t know what you don’t know”. To throw in some personal experience, I started out my programming career, like many others, by learning by doing. Through trial and error and the occasional book, I freelanced enough websites and apps that I almost considered myself a proficient developer. It wasn’t until I took courses in formal principles like design patterns, programming paradigms, or architecture that I realized how much I didn’t know. It wasn’t until I worked on team projects that I realized how many practical project management skills I didn’t have. At the time, I “didn’t know what I didn’t know”. In hindsight, embarking on my own startup before building a skills foundation would have been disastrous. As another example, James Proud, the first of the aforementioned “20 under 20″ fellows to have sold his company, actually remarks in the New York Times that “he knows he is missing out on the deep computer science knowledge that he could learn in college”.

And even if you don’t actually have to go to college to learn the things I described above, a college degree provides a baseline measurement for both yourself and others to calibrate against.

Say you’re presiding over a loved one in critical condition after an accident. Suddenly a man pushes through the crowd and declares he is going to do emergency surgery. “Are you a doctor?” you ask. I’m pretty sure “No, I’m self-taught,” wouldn’t be your preferred reply.

That was a contrived example, but there are legitimate cases where a college degree serves as a proxy for qualifications: when you’re looking through resumes, when an investor is deciding whether to make a bet on your team. Like all proxies, it’s not perfect, but in a world with finite resources, it’s an unavoidable shortcut.

A Life Foundation

In addition to technical skills, college also teaches the life skills needed to succeed. Don’t worry – I’m not getting philosophical on you. As an engineer, I find unquantifiable “life skills” like “networking” a bit hokey. But as long as we’re talking about networking, where do you think most startups hire from? Or find their cofounders?

I met my co-founder Neil Joglekar in the dorms playing poker. After we were able to take each other’s money without wanting to kill each other (mostly), I knew we could get along as friends. And after working on class projects together, I knew we could function as a team. The same advice is reiterated on Hacker News time and time again: college is one of the best resources for starting your company and career. The population at large agrees – according to Forbes and Pew Research Center,

• 74% of respondents say college helped them grow intellectually, 
• 69% say it helped them mature as a person, and 
• 55% say it helped them prepare for a job or career.

But even if you believe the best school is the school of hard knocks, college as a skills proxy applies to life skills as well. For the outside observer, the fact that you completed college shows you can finish what you start.

For example, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a founder is to persevere through the inevitable low points. Paul Graham calls this getting through the Trough of Sorrow. Seth Godin calls it getting past “The Dip” in the eponymous The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit. However you want to describe it, there will come a time that will test you and your team’s conviction. You’ll have to scrap your shiny new interface after usability testing reveals it’s not so shiny after all and start over from scratch. You’ll pour countless hours into creating single-use, throwaway presentations. And before you’ve actually performed these trials by fire, your past accomplishments are the only pseudo-guarantee your investors, co-founder, and team have that you won’t cut and run as soon as the next shiny thing comes along. For those of you deciding whether to drop out of school, your main accomplishment probably *is* school.

Stay in School

In closing, hopefully I’ve made the case for NOT dropping out of school to pursue a startup. I’d love to hear your perspective on the topic – please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below or contact me at yang.christian [at] gmail [dot] com. In the immortal words of Arthur Fonzarelli (am I showing my age?): “Staying in school… is cool.”

If you’re a technical founder, check out John Allspaw’s great essay On Being A Senior Engineer ↩