I am a third-year PhD candidate working on cultivated meat. In my research, I have developed a new and original approach to making cultivated meat that has the potential of being highly scalable and help reach economic parity, more than most other known methods that companies are working on.
My supervisor has left it up to me to decide whether to patent this method or not. I have half-based beliefs that patenting would be counter-productive in helping cultivated meat reach the market sooner, but I acknowledge that I am not knowledgeable enough in IP law/structures to really know.
If I do decide to patent the method, the patent will mostly belong to and be written by the Tech Transfer office at my university, which is of course for profit. I am not sure I trust them to consider my wish to make a fairly non-limiting patent. The usual course of this kind of thing is then for the tech transfer office to open a private startup to further develop the method. In any case, I intend to publish the method in a scientific journal. If we patent it, then it would be published after filing.
What would be best for the field as a whole - a scenario where scientists patent their findings and then publish them, or where they just publish everything open source? Given that most scientists do patent and keep everything secret within companies, what would be best to do in my position?
I don't know how any of this works, but is it a possibility for you to tell the Tech Transfer office that you will let them file the patent conditionally on it being free-license/non-limiting, otherwise you will publish it open-source? In line with TeddyW's response — it sounds like licensing with "altruistic clauses" is something that the Tech Transfer office would be opposed to, given that they are for-profit; but maybe you have some leverage because presumably they have some incentive to file for the patent rather than it being fully open-source..?