Duke to take UH physicist
to Supreme Court

Duke University says it uses the patented
lasers to conduct research, not business

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Associated Press

DURHAM, N.C. >> Duke University plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on a 5-year-old dispute with a University of Hawaii physicist over a laser laboratory the scientist created at Duke in the 1980s.

A federal appeals court revived this fall a claim by John Madey that Duke violated his patents on equipment in use at Duke's Free Electron Laser Lab.

Madey sued Duke and left for the University of Hawaii after Duke administrators took control of the lab, alleging that Madey managed it poorly and left equipment dormant while other researchers clamored to use it.

Duke had convinced a lower court that the university is exempt from patent restrictions in the case because it uses lasers in the lab to conduct research, not business. But the appeals court disagreed, noting that Duke is in the business of pursuing research, though it is a nonprofit organization.

That finding could have implications for campuses nationally. So Duke will ask the Supreme Court to review it, knowing the highest court hears only a fraction of the cases that come its way.

"A case like this has impact beyond this university. That makes it more likely the court would look at it," Duke spokesman David Jarmul said.

A free-electron laser that Madey brought to Duke, called the Mark III, uses moving electrons to produce beams of extremely high radiation that can be tuned precisely for many different tasks. Madey owns patents on equipment and a procedure still used to operate the laser. These days, scientists at Duke use the Mark III laser to try to improve brain surgery and study infrared photo chemistry, among other things.

Madey invented the free-electron laser while at Stanford University. The U.S. Department of Defense paid for his work for many years, permitting Madey to tune his lasers to collaborate with biomedical researchers, new-materials tinkerers and others. Free-electron lasers were expected to play a starring role in Ronald Reagan's "star wars" defense initiative before it was scrapped.

Madey says the dispute does not stem from his management. He says the university wanted to use the free-electron laser to find work for other faculty members, though the research was outside limits set by his government funding.

In court filings he accuses the university of breach of contract, hindering his research and limiting his use of his laser -- as well as the patent violations. And he would like the laser he built removed from Durham and sent to Hawaii.

Madey needs the laser to pursue other defense-related work, such as his interest in developing the device as a sensor of security threats to the United States, including underground nuclear explosions in other nations, said his Raleigh attorney, Randall Roden.

"The question is, Who needs it more urgently?" Roden said.