Peter:
"I would not think that Professor Ratnieks or the University of Sussex are interested in the sale of vaporisers! The idea is ludicrous."
Worldwide, there have been significant shifts in how universities operate over the past decades - it's evolved. I don't know about the U.K., but I do know about the USA and several other countries, where a different model now prevails.
I can address the US. Forty years ago, most scientists did their research, published, and if they found something of commercial value, the intellectual property often was either the property of the sponsor or had to be commercialized by an independent company. Gatorade is often pointed to as an opportunity lost, when neither the researchers nor the university received any of the profits.
The laws in the USA changed at the Federal level with passage of the Bahy-Dole act of 1980.
"The Bayh-Dole Act allows for the transfer of exclusive control over many government funded inventions to universities and businesses operating with federal contracts for the purpose of further development and commercialization. The contracting universities and businesses are then permitted to exclusively license the inventions to other parties. The federal government, however, retains "March-in" rights to license the invention to a third party, without the consent of the patent holder or original licensee, where it determines the invention is not being made available to the public on a reasonable basis, (in other words, to issue a compulsory license.) ".
Bahy0Dole was followed by passage of enabling acts in each of the states - Montana was slow, I think it was the 23 state to change its laws. Prior to that, in Montana neither UM, I, and my research partners faced major legal barriers with respect to commercializing the methods and equipment that we developed - UM could patent, but then things got complicated. For example, it was a conflict of interest for the innovators to have anything to do with commercialization. That's also why many ideas never got off the shelf.
Peter, your comment reflects the way things were handled 30 years ago in the USA. The opposite is true today in the USA, where there is pressure to patent and license in addition to simply publishing.
So, it is possible that the PR department or Business Development part of a University would advertise the availability of a method for use and/or a device such as a vaporizer.
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