If you’ll be at the BIO International Convention next week, let’s get together.  Send me a note via the Contact Us window in the lefthand column of this page, or leave a voicemail at 610-328-0580.

While at BIO, you should pick up the latest copy of Biotechnology Law Report—the journal I founded in 1982 with publisher Mary Ann Liebert.  We’re up to the third issue of volume 30 … still going strong.  Get it at Exhibit Booth 4213, in the Clinical Trials section of Hall C, where you’ll also see their flagship trade paper GEN, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.

My latest article in GEN urges Congress to fund a transformation of the information infrastructure for examining U.S. patent applications.  It follows up on an editorial I published in Biotechnology Law Report back in 2007, which happens to have been cited in the Wikipedia entry on latent semantic analysis.

Then be sure to flip over your June 2011 issue of BLR, because the back cover features a spectacular illustration that I commissioned from Philadelphia artist Tim Durning.  It depicts a dream where I am fancifully transported into a science fiction story written by Damon Knight in 1953 (coincidentally, the year Watson & Crick sussed out the DNA double helix).

 And while in Washington, stay tuned for the latest developments on patent law in Congress.  The U.S. House of Representatives is imminently expected to consider H.R. 1249, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.  Many of us had high hopes that the Bill would end the practice of diverting fees collected from users of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to other governmental use, in accordance with the expectation of the patent community in 1999 when the U.S. PTO was declared a PBO.  As chair of the Legislative Committee of the Philadelphia Intellectual Property Law Association, I recently prepared for PIPLA’s Board of Governors a resolution they recently sent to Congress, urging full funding of the PTO.