<p>Quite often I see threads regarding the importance of getting published on medical school admission chances.</p>
<p>I personally dropped out of a lab because I wasn’t able to make much of an impact in that field and have since conducted research with a partner that yielded a coauthorship for my part on two US patents.</p>
<p>How do you think an admissions committee would view a patent on your r</p>
<p>It really depends on the specific patent and your ability to explain/discuss its importance. </p>
<p>I think dropping out of a lab because you weren’t able to “make in impact on the field” is kind of a dumb reason personally. Most pre-med researchers aren’t going to discover anything revolutionary. Just my opinion.</p>
<p>I doubt a patent is going to make significant impression on an adcomm unless it’s applicable to the medical field or in scientific field where the particular adcomm reviewing your application has research and/or experience.</p>
<p>In some research areas, patents are routinely filed for any tiny incremental change or difference from previous patents. Most are filed for purely defensive commercial reasons or because they are required by company policy. Most patents never make any kind of impact in the real world.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should rephrase: by not making an impact I meant that the lab I was “researching” in didn’t have anything for me to do, and was content using me as a guinea pig and lab decoration. That’s why I dropped it, didn’t feel like I was doing anything that helped.</p>
<p>On a different note I perform research related to my inventions quite often, and also work in a cell biology research lab, although I’m not involved in the research but rather maintaining our frog colony and the lab in general. I feel these are more worthwhile ways to spend my time, even though there is next to no chance of landing me a coauthor spot on a published article. </p>
<p>Well, fingers crossed that the adcoms don’t burn me for not doing the conventional.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses guys.</p>
<p>I am the sole author and owner of a U.S. patent on a Positron Emmision Tomography (PET) gamma camera used in Nuclear Medicine. The problem with trying to substitute a patent for a journal publication is that if the invention is based on a physical science like Physics it is likely that very few medical doctors have the background in physical sciences to understand and appreciate it. I filed my patent application when I was a Nuclear Medicine resident based on concepts I had learned as an undergraduate Astronomy major. The reason I am the sole author and owner of the patent is that I could not interest any of the physicians who were faculty in the Nuclear Medicine Department of my program (who knew no Calculus nor had much of an understanding of Physics) simply did not understand the science on which my invention was based. They knew how to read the images the gamma cameras produced and use them to make clinical evaluations but had no idea how those images were produced.</p>
<p>
How could physicians in a Nuclear Medical Department not know Calculus or Physics? Were they specialists and not professors?</p>
<p>Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that patents even outside of medicine can be impressive.</p>
<p>I come from a family that holds well over 300 patents and they’re impressive (and some are used in products that many of us use everyday.). Although none of the holders have applied to med school, their patents showcase their talents, ingenuity, and ability to “think outside the box”…which I think would still impress Adcoms because those kinds of thinking skills can have very broad applications for problem solving.</p>
<p>D1 (physics major w/ grad physics classes under her belt) said she’s constantly surprised at how little physics & math the radiation oncology/radiology people know. (Hasn’t interacted with nuclear medicine so no comments on them yet.)</p>
<p>DH and D1 both say it’s easier to teach a physicist biology than to teach a biologist physics…</p>
<p>BTW, DH holds 8 basic patents, both solo and as part of a small group of 3, that cover a huge range potential applications. The trouble with patents is that when one applies for them, often the engineer/scientist is just WAGing about how the dscovery will be used in the future since it’s often not immediately apparent. This is very common in basic research fields. (Do you think Marie Curie could foresee the whole field computer-assisted tomography when she discovered that radium produce x-rays?)</p>
<p>The value of being a patent-holder varies wildly depending on the kind of patent one hold. Some basic patents have the potential to be world-changing; patents for an improved JiffyPop pan? Not so much.</p>