Redressing the balance: the rise of the female inventor

The 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 algae. The results were then processed in order to try to improve the adhesion.

However, the ingredient samples 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 after 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.

“FIRST ATTEMPTS TO COMMERCIALISE THE INVENTION BY SELLING THE IDEA TO BIG PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES SEEMED TO CONFIRM HER SCEPTICISM, AS THE OFFERS THEY MADE WERE VERY LOW.”

Perhaps women tend to be more down-to-earth than men, which may at least partly explain the relatively low proportions of women registered as inventors, but Bianco-Peled was finally persuaded of the commercial potential of her invention by her spouse.

First attempts to commercialise the invention by selling the idea to big pharmaceutical companies seemed to confirm her scepticism, however, as the offers they made were very low.

In addition, it would later appear that cooperating with these companies was antithetical to the concept of academic research, since the companies demanded participation in R&D that boiled down to academically uninteresting developments that the institute was not geared for.

Fortunately, at the time Bianco-Peled was searching for an appropriate framework, the Mann Foundation for biomedical engineering established the Alfred Mann Institute at the Technion (AMIT) as a university-based institute designed to enable commercialisation of innovative biomedical technologies that improve human health. Bianco-Peled co-founded SeaLantis, one of the three first companies under AMIT.

Bianco-Peled and her group now have a portfolio of inventions in this field, but although the commercial aspect of the inventions is adequately addressed by SeaLantis, the strain between publishing and patenting inventions emerging from the academic community remains a thorny issue.

Innovative refills

Carmit Turgeman graduated from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology with a degree in industrial management and engineering in 2005. Her inventions relate to various refillable dispensers, the first being conceived during a vacation in 2004.

As she packed for her trip, a big glass container of very expensive perfume broke. It occurred to her that small refillable bottles, each containing a different perfume, would be ideal for travelling. However, she failed to find any suitable apparatus for doing it, except for rather messy bottles into which perfume was poured.

Turgeman then built and tested a one-way valve as a refill mechanism that can be incorporated within a small bottle. The refill mechanism is compatible with standard atomisers, or spraying mechanisms, of full-sized bottles. The small bottle is filled with the perfume simply by removing the cap of the atomiser/spray mechanism, thus exposing a stem, inserting the stem into the one-way valve situated at the underside of the small bottle and letting the perfume flow from the big bottle into the small one.

Turgeman filed patent applications for this as well as other products, attended shows, lectures and courses directed to product design and started showing her products. In 2008 Turgeman joined forces with her present Hong Kong partner for sales around the world, by now numbering many millions. In 2010 her products were awarded Best Beauty Gadget Award at the Cosmopolitan Beauty Awards, Gift of the Year Award from the Giftware Association, and Fifi Award for Technological Breakthrough of the Year.

However, Turgeman has not been allowed to rest on her laurels. Close on the heels of her success, many imitations started to be sold in many countries all over the globe. Fortunately, although a Chinese patent application had never been filed due to fiscal constraints at the start, a utility model had been filed and granted in China. To date, two lawsuits in China have signalled victory against infringers.