Newly inaugurated Minister of Education Wu Maw-kuen (吳茂昆) must disprove an allegation that he breached regulations by founding a company in the US to apply for biotech patents while serving as National Dong Hwa University’s president in an attempt to profit from the school’s intellectual property, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus said yesterday.
During a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Education and Culture Committee on Monday, Wu sought to disavow his alleged involvement in Spiranthes Biotech, which he allegedly established in August 2015, when he was president of the university, KMT Legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) told a news conference in Taipei.
Wu denied founding the company and presented information from the California state government’s Web site on registered businesses, which listed James Ouyang (歐陽彥堂) as the firm’s owner, Ko said.
Photo: Cheng Shu-ting, Taipei Times
However, Wu only disclosed half of the information from the Web site, she said.
Data from the Web site, which she paid US$27 to see, showed that Wu’s name appeared on a list of the firm’s “managers or members” as a manager and agent for the company, Ko said.
She accused Wu of applying for a technology patent in China in September 2015 using the company’s name without informing the university.
“As students wanted to obtain patents in China and to reduce patent application fees, James Ouyang proposed applying for a Patent Cooperation Treaty patent in the US, which would automatically grant applicants patent rights in Japan, China and the EU,” Wu said in a statement.
“However, as Taiwan is not a member of international organizations, Taiwanese must apply through China, which is something I could not accept. That is why we decided to found a company in the US, the sole purpose of which is to apply for patents,” he said, adding that he planned to give the patent rights to the university after obtaining them.
Wu has applied for five patents in four nations in the company’s name, and in all of the applications he specified that the university should have the priority claim for any patent awarded, Taipei city councilor aspirant Yu Shu-hui (游淑惠) of the KMT said.
However, Wu did not obtain the university’s approval before applying for the patents, nor did he sign a contract or agreement with the school to warrant a subsequent transfer of intellectual property rights, which could have easily been arranged, as he was president and allegedly one of the company’s managers at the time, Yu said.
University secretary-general Ku Chih-hsiung (古智雄) said school staff were unaware of the US company or its attempts to apply for patents in China until they saw it on the news.
The university still owns the rights to the technology, he said.
Prosecutors and investigators should inquire into the firm’s background to determine whether it was founded to help the university obtain patents or to steal its intellectual property, he said.
If Wu cannot prove that he is not a manager or agent of Spiranthes Biotech, he would be in breach of the Civil Servant Work Act (公務員服務法), which prohibits civil servants from engaging in most commercial activities, KMT Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) said.
Control Yuan member Kao Feng-hsien (高鳳仙) yesterday said she would investigate the matter to clarify if Wu has breached that act or the Act on the Recusal of Public Servants Due to Conflict of Interest (公職人員利益衝突迴避法).
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater