PrizeWinning – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

How much will someone be willing to pay for a few pages of quarter-century-old bureaucratic university paperwork that have been turned into a blockchain-encoded piece of digital art?

The University of California, Berkeley, hopes quite a bit, and it is about to find out.

Berkeley announced on Thursday that it will auction the first of two digital art pieces known as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, next week. The object being offered is based on a document called an invention and technology disclosure. That’s the form that researchers at Berkeley fill out to alert the university about discoveries that have potential to be turned into lucrative patents.

The title of the invention, from 1996, is “Blockade of T-Lymphocyte Down-Regulation Associated with CTLA-4 Signalling.”

The university hopes that potential bidders will be attracted to an early description of a revolutionary approach to treating cancer developed by James P. Allison, then a professor at Berkeley. He found a way to turn off the immune system’s aversion to attacking tumors and he showed that it worked in mice.

That advance eventually led to the creation of Yervoy, a drug for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, and Dr. Allison, who is now at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2018.

Thus, the Berkeley disclosure form could be thought of as the scientific equivalent of Mickey Mantle’s rookie baseball card — a memento of the beginnings of greatness.

“I think of it almost as a history of science artifact,” said Richard K. Lyons, the chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer at Berkeley. “Imagine somebody saying, ‘I want to own the NFTs for the 10 most important scientific discoveries of my lifetime.’”

A 24-hour auction of the NFT of Dr. Allison’s invention disclosure will take place as early as June 2 using Foundation, an NFT auction marketplace that uses Ethereum, the cryptocurrency network of choice for NFT collectors.

Eighty-five percent of the proceeds will go to Berkeley to finance research, the remainder to Foundation. If the piece is later resold, Berkeley will receive 10 percent of the sale and Foundation 5 percent.

Because the making of an NFT requires a lot of computing power, part of the money the university earns from the NFT sale will be used for carbon offsets to compensate for the energy consumed, Berkeley officials said.

The second NFT that Berkeley plans to auction in the coming weeks will be the disclosure form describing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing invention by Jennifer A. Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley. She shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens for their work on the technique.

NFTs have become trendy collectibles in recent months. A unique code embedded in a digital image or video serves as a record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain, the same technology that underlies digital currencies like Bitcoin. NFTs can then be bought and sold, just like baseball cards, and the blockchain ensures they cannot be deleted or counterfeited.

A dizzying array of documents, far beyond traditional works of art, have been sold as NFTs. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million. Kevin Roose, a New York Times columnist, sold an NFT of his article about NFTs for more than half a million dollars. (The money went to The Times’s Neediest Cases Fund.)

The pages of Dr. Allison’s disclosure form, drawn from the Berkeley archives, make for mostly dry reading. There is a July 11, 1995, letter from Carol Mimura, a licensing associate at Berkeley, thanking Dr. Allison for contacting the university’s office of technology licensing and asking him to fill out some forms. Another page includes Berkeley’s patent policy.

The documents reflect quaintly archaic technologies used in the mid-1990s — typewriters, fax machines and handwritten notes. “I am scrambling to protect patentable matter before late July,” reads a memo from Dr. Mimura, now the assistant vice chancellor for intellectual property and industry research alliances.

A fax from Dr. Allison to Dr. Mimura includes a simple chart with three lines and 21 data points. “Carol — This is the data that has got us excited,” Dr. Allison has scribbled.

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

Until now, these forms, filed away, unseen, have had no value, Dr. Allison concedes.

“That very first exposure to the world is sort of like, ‘This is the invention disclosure,’” he said. “But once they’ve served that purpose, historically, they get no attention.”

The NFT idea was the brainchild of Michael Alvarez Cohen, director of innovation ecosystem development in Berkeley’s intellectual property office. He said part of the idea came after the publication of “The Code Breaker” by Walter Isaacson, a biography of Dr. Doudna. His friends and relatives told him that they had not known that much of the gene editing technology had originated at Berkeley.

“So I was kind of like, ‘Maybe we should post excerpts from the invention disclosure to help promote this,’” he said.

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

“Then about a month ago, I put the two together,” Mr. Cohen said. Take the invention disclosures about Nobel-winning research like CRISPR, turn them into NFTs, “and drive awareness and also fund research by auctioning the NFTs.”

He sat on the idea for a while.

“I come up with a lot of ideas,” Mr. Cohen said. “Some of them are bone-headed and everything.”

Just over two weeks ago, he started discussing it with his colleagues, and quickly a plan fell into place. In addition to CRISPR, they decided to highlight Dr. Allison’s work.

The Allison NFT is more than a simple digital document. “It’s a combination of a lab notebook and digital art,” Mr. Cohen said. A single image includes 10 pages but one can zoom in and read the documents. “I really wanted to preserve the ability to read the history in addition to viewing the beauty of the image,” he said.

The designers of the NFT also included subtle nods to the initial resistance to Dr. Allison’s ideas. The pages are all slightly tilted, because “people looked at him askew,” Mr. Cohen said. “There’s a lot of little things like that in the art.”

Dr. Lyons was reluctant to predict how much the artwork would fetch at auction. “I’d be surprised if it went for less than $100,000,” he said. “It could go into seven figures. This is a new category, and it’s hard to price anything that is a new category.”

Wayne Peterson, a prolific composer whose winning 1992 Pulitzer Prize sparked the debate over whether the best judges of music were the experts or the average listener, died in San Francisco on April 7th. He was 93 years old.

His son Grant confirmed the death in a hospital that he said came just seven weeks after that of Mr. Peterson’s decade-long companion, Ruth Knier.

Mr. Peterson won the Pulitzer for his composition “The Face of the Night, the Heart of Darkness”, but it was only after the 19-member Pulitzer Committee rejected the advice of the three-member music jury that Ralph Sheay’s “Concerto Fantastique” received the award.

The jury consisted of composers who had the opportunity to study the scores of the works under consideration, while the members of the committee, mainly journalists, had no particular musical expertise. The dedusting began when the jury’s recommendation to the committee only presented one piece, Mr. Shapey’s, and not the usual three candidates.

The committee returned the recommendation and requested at least one more name. When the jury responded with the work of Mr. Shapey and Mr. Peterson and indicated that Mr. Shapey’s work was the first choice, the committee awarded the award to Mr. Peterson instead. The judges responded with a sharply worded complaint, which in part said: “Such changes by a committee with no professional musical expertise, if continued, will guarantee a regrettable devaluation of this uniquely important award.”

The incident sparked considerable contemplation as to whether experts or a more general body should determine the winner of the music award, an issue the Pulitzers previously faced in other genres. The argument was puzzling because, as the New York Times music critics later wrote, it wasn’t necessarily that Mr. Peterson’s work was more listener-friendly than Mr. Shapey’s – both men wrote atonal works. Some authors suggested that it was simply the Pulitzer Committee, which reiterated its dominance over the jury.

In any event, the controversy put Mr. Peterson in an awkward position because he knew the judges who had objected to the decision and because he showed admiration for Mr. Shapey’s work.

“He would have been thrilled to finish second,” said Grant Peterson.

“There was no bad blood,” he added. “It was just kind of crap because he didn’t do it.”

Mr Peterson himself admitted that the argument left him with mixed feelings.

“I had submitted the work as a lark and I didn’t think I had any remote chance of winning at all,” he told The Times in 1992. “I’ve won other awards, but the Pulitzer’s prestige is greater than that.” that of the others. The controversy made it a little different. I just hope the Pall that cast it doesn’t jeopardize what the Pulitzer could mean to get my music into circulation. “

Grant Peterson said the episode turned out to be a plus in that regard – the award increased his father’s notoriety and earned him more lucrative jobs.

Wayne Turner Peterson was born on September 3, 1927 in Albert Lea, Minnesota. His father, Leslie, was “a victim of the Depression,” he told The Associated Press in 1992, who “jumped from one thing to another”. ;; His mother, Irma (Turner) Peterson, died when he was young, and he lived with his grandmother afterwards, his son said.

His musical skills, which he said came from his mother’s side, showed up early on.

“I was very interested in jazz piano and was a professional jazz musician from the age of 15,” he said. “I made my way through college playing jazz, three degrees from the University of Minnesota” – a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree, all of which were earned in the 1950s.

In 1960 he became professor of music at San Francisco State University, where he taught composition for more than 30 years. He was living in San Francisco when he died.

Mr. Peterson’s career as a composer began in 1958 with the performance of his “Free Variations” by the Minnesota Orchestra. He composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and other, sometimes unusual, groups. “And the Winds Shall Blow”, which premiered in Germany in 1994, was described as a fantasy “for saxophone quartet, wind instruments and percussion”. There was also his duo for viola and violoncello.

“The duo is a nervous, effectively written piece, filled with dark melodies that are well suited to these lower string instruments. It reaches a quick and exciting climax,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in The Times when the work was on 92nd Street in 1988 Y was listed.

Mr. Peterson felt it was important for a composer to hear the works of others across a broad spectrum.

“I don’t limit myself to a group of composers,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1991. “I try to hear everything and when I hear something I like it gets distilled in my psyche and comes out somewhere in my music. “

His love for jazz found its way into his compositions, including “The Face of the Night, the Heart of Darkness”.

“There’s a lot of syncopation that can be associated with jazz,” he said of the work, “but it’s not a jazz piece.”

It was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in October 1991. George Perle, the chairman of the Pulitzer jury who recommended the Shapely piece, endeavored to praise Mr. Peterson’s composition despite the controversy.

“It’s absolutely worthy of a Pulitzer Prize,” he said in 1992. “But the Pulitzer Prize is supposed to be for the best job of the year, and on that occasion we felt there was one job that was more impressive.” ”

Even Mr Shapey, who died in 2002 and was known for being open-minded, came to view his missed award with a touch of humor.

“A Chicago critic called me ‘Ralph Shapey the Non-Pulitzer Prize Winner,'” he told The Times in 1996. “You have to put that on my tombstone.”

Mr. Peterson’s marriage to Harriet Christensen ended in divorce in the 1970s. In addition to his son Grant, three other sons, Alan, Craig and Drew, as well as two grandchildren survive.

Grant Peterson said that since his father’s death he had looked through his papers and marveled at his productivity – not just about his 80 or so finished compositions, but also the countless fragments.

“There is the stuff that is bound and ready and released,” he said, “but mixed in with it is the chicken scratch on yellow tablets. The guy was a music machine.”