A few years back, I had a strange encounter on the train with Ronald Plasterk, whom I knew from my time in The Hague. Plasterk was a Member of Parliament and Minister from 2007 to 2017. On the train, he proudly talked about his scientific inventions and how he had managed to monetise them. In 2018, Plasterk became a professor in Amsterdam and founded a biotech company (Frame Therapeutics) that he sold for €32 million in 2022. However, after our talk was over, I was left with a question: when had Plasterk done this research? Ministers have almost no time to spare, and certainly not for scientific research. I found the answer in a reconstruction in the NRC newspaper of 22 March 2024: ‘How Ronald Plasterk became a millionaire – and the university lost out.’
Plasterk had applied for a patent for knowledge developed mainly by a colleague: microbiologist Jan Koster. Koster had built an open access database that could be freely used by academics around the world for cancer research. The reconstruction in NRC paints a picture of a former politician who used his name and network to make a lot of money at the expense of others. I found what happened next quite remarkable: it was not Plasterk but Koster who was told off by the Amsterdam UMC, and the UvA initially glossed over Plasterk’s actions. Things went very differently in politics, after Geert Wilders suggested Plasterk become the prime minister in May. Highly respected figures like Johan Remkes questioned Plasterk’s integrity at the time.
The questions about Plasterk’s integrity were enough for the political parties PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB to withdraw their nomination for him to become prime minister. The Plasterk case also became a topic of discussion in the legal community, including an article by the expert Alexander Tsoutsanis in the law journal Nederlands Juristenblad in June 2024. He tore into Plasterk’s defence (and that of the UvA), which claimed that the patent had been granted legitimately. Tsoutsanis stated that rights belong to all researchers and to the university and that Plasterk should not have been able to obtain the patent in this way. He also believed that Plasterk’s actions were at odds with the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. The debates served as a wake-up call for the UvA, which determined that Plasterk’s actions were not defensible after all.
The scientific community would do well to learn several lessons from the Plasterk case. It is important to know whether this professor violated academic regulations. If so, measures need to be taken: well-known researchers with a significant network should not get in the way of honest science. Conversely, it is also important to know when such patent applications are actually legitimate.
We also need to ask whether the commercial mindset at universities hasn’t gone too far and whether we should offer academic researchers better protection. There may be a sense of embarrassment at the UvA about having let a crafty former politician get one over on them. This is another important lesson, both for the UvA and for all other universities.
