FEMALE INVENTORS
Te days when women were legally compelled to register their inventions in the name of their male partners, as inventors and/or assignees, are, thankfully, long over. In the past decades, women have invented and registered patents in various fields. For example, in the 1940s film actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented frequency hopping, a wireless communication method in wide use today; in the 1950s Grace Murray Hopper invented the compiler, a computer program that enables modern computers to understand our instructions; in the early 1970s Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar, the material used for bullet-proof vests; and Patricia Billings registered patents for Geobond, a very strong and heat-resistant building material, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Various studies show a steady increase in the proportion of patents in which women are registered as inventors, from a mere 1 to 2 percent in various countries until two decades ago, to about 5 to 10 percent in the past decade. Women inventors should be actively encouraged and promoted by
society in their inventive endeavours, and in this spirit, our office in Haifa, Israel, is making a modest contribution by presenting the invention stories of two Israeli women represented by our office.
Synthetic adhesives
Havazelet Bianco-Peled has been a professor of chemical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology since 1999. Her patent and patent applications relate to biomedical adhesives that can act under wet conditions. Her research was initially done in response to a call from a European consortium to investigate the adhesion of algae, which are known to adhere to surfaces underwater by secreting a mixture of ingredients that react to form a ‘glue’.
Back then, there were no thoughts regarding the commercial implications of her research, as it was focused on the mechanism of adhesion. Bianco-Peled examined samples that were periodically sent to her from the consortium
members, who extracted the ingredients from the 80 World Intellectual Property Review Annual 2012
algae. Te results were then processed in order to try to improve the adhesion. However, the ingredient s amp l e s were minute and difficult to extract. Bianco-Peled started to think about biomimetic alternatives, ie, synthetic materials that mimic the properties of the naturally derived materials, merely to end the dependency of her research progress on such small samples.
Even aſter obtaining very successful adhesion results with the invented synthetic biomimetic adhesives, Bianco-Peled remained reluctant to register the invention as a patent. She preferred simply to publish her results in a distinguished academic magazine. Perhaps women tend to be more down-to-earth than men, which may at least partly explain the relatively low proportions of
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