Nobel Prize-related NFTs auctioned in Berkeley

How much would someone be willing to pay for a few pages of a quarter-century-old bureaucratic college document converted to blockchain-encoded digital art?

The University of California, Berkeley wants a lot.

Berkeley announced Thursday that it will auction the first of two digital artworks known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) next week. The objects provided are based on documents called inventions and technical disclosures. This is a form that Berkeley researchers fill out to warn the university of potential patent findings.

The title of the invention has been “Blocking T lymphocyte downregulation associated with CTLA-4 signaling” since 1996.

The university hopes that potential bidders will be attracted to the early explanation of the innovative approach to treating cancer developed by. James P. Allison, Then a professor at Berkeley. He found a way to stop the immune system from attacking tumors and showed that it works in mice.

That progress ultimately led to the development of Yervoy, a treatment for metastatic melanoma, and Dr. Allison, now at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, said. Received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018..

Therefore, Berkeley’s disclosure form can be considered a scientific equivalent of Mickey Mantle’s rookie baseball card. This is a monument to the beginning of greatness.

“I think this is almost the same as the history of scientific artifacts,” said Richard K. Lions, Chief Executive Officer of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley. “Imagine someone saying,’I want to own an NFT of the 10 most important scientific discoveries in my life.’”

24-hour auction Dr. Allison’s Invention Disclosure NFT Will take place as early as June 2nd. Foundation, NFT Auction Marketplace using Ethereum, the cryptocurrency network of choice for NFT collectors.

Eighty-five percent of the proceeds will be donated to Berkeley for research and the rest will be donated to the Foundation. If the work is later resold, Berkeley will receive 10% of the sales and the Foundation will receive 5%.

Because creating NFTs requires a lot of computing power, some of the money college earns from selling NFTs is used for carbon offsets to supplement the energy consumed.

The second NFT that Berkeley will auction in the coming weeks is a disclosure form that describes the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. Jennifer A. Doudna, Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley.She shared 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry For research on this technology, with Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens.

NFTs have become a trendy collection in recent months. Unique code embedded in digital images and videos acts as a record of its authenticity and is stored on the blockchain. This is the same technology that underlies digital currencies such as Bitcoin. NFTs can be bought and sold like baseball cards and cannot be deleted or counterfeited by blockchain.

A dazzling series of documents that go far beyond traditional works of art is sold as NFTs. Sold by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey NFT for his first tweet of $ 2.9 millionKevin Ruth, a New York Times columnist, His article on NFT For over $ 500,000(Money is The Times’s Neediest Cases Fund.. )

The pages of Dr. Allison’s disclosure form, drawn from the Berkeley archive, are almost dry reading. On July 11, 1995, I received a letter from Berkeley’s licensing associate Carol Mimura, thanking Dr. Allison for contacting the university’s technology licensing office and asking them to fill out some forms. I will. Another page contains Berkeley’s patent policy.

These documents reflect old-fashioned, quaint technologies such as typewriters, fax machines, and handwritten notes used in the mid-1990s. “I’m struggling to protect patentable issues by late July,” reads the memorandum of Dr. Mimura, who is currently Vice President of the Intellectual Property and Industrial Research Alliance.

The fax from Dr. Allison to Dr. Mimura contains a simple chart consisting of 3 lines and 21 data points. “Carroll — this is the data that excited us,” Dr. Allison scribbled.

His research group is experimenting with colon cancer in mice, and blocking CTLA-4, a protein receptor that acts as an on / off switch for the immune system, “leads to tumor rejection in 5/5 mice. “It was,” wrote Dr. Allison.

Dr. Allison admits that until now, these forms were filed, invisible, and worthless.

“The first exposure to the world is like’this is the disclosure of the invention’,” he said. “But historically, when they serve that purpose, they lose their attention.”

The idea for NFTs comes from Michael Alvarez Cohen, director of innovation ecosystem development at Berkeley’s Intellectual Property Office. He has some of the ideas Walter Isaacson’s “Code Breaker”, Biography of Dr. Doudna. His friends and relatives told him he was unaware that many of his gene editing techniques were born in Berkeley.

“So I thought I should post an excerpt from the invention disclosure to facilitate this,” he said.

At the same time, he was following the news about blockchain and NFTs.

“About a month ago, I combined the two,” Cohen said. We take disclosures of inventions related to Nobel Prize-winning research such as CRISPR, convert them to NFTs, and “fund the research by promoting awareness and auctioning NFTs.”

He sat down on that idea for a while.

“I come up with a lot of ideas,” Cohen said. “Some of them are painstaking and all.”

Just about two weeks ago, he started discussing it with his colleagues and soon the plan was settled. In addition to CRISPR, I decided to emphasize Dr. Allison’s work.

Allison NFTs are more than just digital documents. “It’s a combination of lab notebooks and digital art,” says Cohen. One image contains 10 pages, but you can zoom in to read the document. “I wanted to preserve not only the beauty of the images, but the ability to read history,” he said.

The NFT designer also included a subtle nod to the initial resistance to Dr. Allison’s ideas. Cohen said the pages were all slightly tilted because “people looked at him at an angle.” “There are many such small things in art.”

Dr. Lions was hesitant to predict how much artwork would sell at auction. “It would be surprising if it was less than $ 100,000,” he said. “It could be seven digits. This is a new category and it’s difficult to price a new category.”