Are university policies holding science back? Study shows how patenting boosts pure research.

By Scott Morrison, UC Berkeley Haas

When UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna first began studying how bacteria fight virus infections, she had no idea it would result in one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the century. Her curiosity-driven research on an obscure bacterial immune system called CRISPR eventually led to a revolutionary gene-editing tool—and earned her the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

But Doudna didn’t just published her findings in academic journals, she also filed patents and founded multiple biotech companies to bring her discoveries to the world. Today, Doudna holds more than 100 U.S. patents alongside her 300-plus scientific publications. She embodies the type of researcher that a new UC Berkeley study suggests we need more of—scientists who refuse to choose between advancing fundamental knowledge and creating practical applications.

The new study, published November 27 in the journal Science, reveals that researchers who both publish papers and file patents—dubbed “Pasteur’s quadrant researchers” after pioneering microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur—produce work that is more novel and more influential than those who stick to just one activity. The finding challenges long-held assumptions that scientists should focus pure research and leave applications to others.

“Having some understanding of the application of your research—as you do it—actually increases the impact of your science,” says study co-author Lee Fleming, a professor with appointments at UC Berkeley Haas and UC Berkeley Engineering. “The old linear model is that real scientists do pure science and don’t want to get their hands dirty. Our work adds to the evidence that the linear model is probably wrong and that we should encourage scientists to think about their application while they are doing their research.”

“Having some understanding of the application of your research—as you do it—actually increases the impact of your science.”

—Professor Lee Fleming

First comprehensive evidence

The research team, which included Institute for Business Innovation researcher Emma Scharfmann, MEng 24 (AI & operations research), and professor Matt Marx of Cornell’s SC Johnson School of Business, linked all science publications and U.S. patents to create a dataset of nearly 700,000 individuals who’ve both published and patented since 1976.

The study provides the first comprehensive evidence that combining scientific inquiry with practical invention doesn’t diminish either effort—it enhances both.

The study provides the first comprehensive evidence that combining scientific inquiry with practical invention doesn’t diminish either effort—it enhances both.

The findings have significant implications for how universities evaluate faculty and how funding agencies allocate grants. For example, tenure criteria that penalize patenting—or even view it as a distraction from “real” research—may be counterproductive.

A diagram showing the fields of science and class of technology for the 700,000 “Pasteur’s quadrant researchers” that the research team identified. (Image courtesy of Lee Fleming)

Complementary influences

According to the study’s authors, working simultaneously in both science and technology exposes researchers to complementary influences that spark greater creativity and spur more innovation. Applied problems can increase motivation and prevent scientists from fixating on unproductive approaches. Conversely, practical research can lead to unexpected observations that scientifically-trained minds are well-positioned to recognize and exploit. One classic example: scientists working on microwave communication technology accidentally discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang.  

“There are those in the science world and those in the patent world. Ideally there are people who straddle both worlds and will see ideas in technology that they can take into science and vice-versa,” says Fleming.

The study found that researchers who published and patented at different points in their careers produced results that were more highly cited and more novel than those who only did one or the other. Researchers who published and patented in the same year were the most novel and highly cited of all.

Early career innovators

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns young scientists. University administrators and tenure committees have long worried that early-career patenting distracts researchers from building a strong publication record. The data suggest otherwise.

Fleming and his team matched dual-purpose researchers by field, university, and number of science publications in the first five years of their career. Scientists who had also patented in their first five years had higher science productivity and impact (as measured by citations from other science papers). Even those who had one fewer publication in their first five years of research had 25% more citations over their career, relative to scientists who did not patent in their first five years of work.

“On the one hand, universities might not be wrong that focusing on patenting in your earlier career ‘crowds out’ time for publishing. But what we’re missing is that this is the sort of applied research that yields the big breakthroughs in the long run,” says Marx, the Bruce F. Failing, Sr. Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Cornell Johnson.

“On the one hand, universities might not be wrong that focusing on patenting in your earlier career ‘crowds out’ time for publishing. But what we’re missing is that this is the sort of applied research that yields the big breakthroughs in the long run.”

—Professor Matt Marx, Cornell

Even so, the researchers caution that their findings are correlational, not causal. They cannot rule out that certain personality traits or institutional environments drive both patenting behavior and research quality. But the patterns are consistent across fields, institutions, and time periods.

Among their other findings:

• The number of dual-purpose researchers has increased by 350% between 1980 and 2016, likely due to the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act allowing universities and small businesses to retain intellectual property rights for inventions resulting from federally-funded research. These “Pasteur quadrant researchers” now comprise about 14% of all inventors and 4% of all scientists.
• Female representation among this group has also grown dramatically—from just 5% in 1980 to more than 25% by 2016.
• These researchers concentrate heavily in wealthy geographic areas. By 2016, the top 1% of U.S. counties by economic output contained nearly half of all dual-purpose researchers.

Changing university policies

Fleming and his co-authors hope their study will encourage universities and funding agencies to reconsider how they allocate funding between basic and applied research, how technology transfers from academia to industry, and what drives science-based entrepreneurship. “Our findings should give pause to those departments with tenure criteria that do not value applied research,” he says.

Momentum is building toward these policies. PTIE, or Promotion & Tenure – Innovation & Entrepreneurship (PTIE), is a global movement to support the recognition of applied research. The University of California enacted a policy in 2021 that explicitly recognizes innovation and entrepreneurial achievements among the criteria for faculty promotion and tenure review.

“Universities were traditionally seen as ivory towers, places for professors to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Today, the society we serve expects more, and needs more than the basic academic research we have excelled at for so long,” wrote UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons, who served Berkeley’s chief innovation & entrepreneurship officer, in the introduction to the new book Startup Campus. “The world is increasingly turning to our universities in pursuit of tangible ideas, innovations, and solutions that will advance the greater good.”

In the meantime, Fleming and his co-authors’ message is clear: the old model that separated scientists from inventors may have been holding back both science and innovation. Researchers like Jennifer Doudna—who move fluidly between publishing papers and filing patents—aren’t diluting their contributions. They’re amplifying them.

Read the full paper:

Pasteur’s quadrant researchers bring novelty, impact to publishing and patenting
By Emma Scharfmann, Matt Marx, and Lee Fleming
Science, November 27, 2025