Around MIT, Jerome Lemelson is a hallowed name. The late inventor's 500- plus patents (more than any other individual save Thomas Edison) earned him enough to endow the Institute's $500,000 Lemelson Prize for technological innovation. But to Seth Shulman, a journalist who is a frequent contributor to TR and a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, Lemelson's success epitomizes a growing scandal in the United States: the privatization of the "conceptual commons. "

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