It’s not easy competing with Sir Elton John. But such was the fate of Robert T. Fraley last week when he received this year’s Biotechnology Heritage Award in Atlanta.

The award is jointly sponsored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the list of previous winners is a veritable who’s who of contemporary biotechnology.

Fraley is the executive vice president and chief technology officer of the Monsanto Company, one of the world’s largest and most innovative agricultural companies. He oversees all the technical aspects of bioengineered products, including corn, soybeans, and cotton, and is considered one of the founding fathers of modern agricultural biotechnology.

Readers will know that there has been much debate—some of it contentious—on the complex legal, ethical, social, and regulatory issues around genetically modified food products. Monsanto has openly contributed to the richness of this debate, and this has influenced a much more informed public attitude in the U.S. than in Europe on the interrelationships between crop improvement, food safety, and the use of science to advance human goals.

And where does Elton John fit into this picture?

The famous pop musician was the lunch speaker following the Biotechnology Heritage Award presentation. I’m sure Fraley told his kids he was the “warm-up act” for the rock star, or perhaps a “hard act to follow.”

But neither man played or sang a note. Sir Elton held forth about his work to eradicate HIV/AIDS. This surely endeared himself to the collected biotechnology folks, many of whom are pursuing the same goal, albeit by different means.

So the occasion showed once again, this time with both food and medicine, that there are many ways to achieve the same end.

With some hesitation, I finally gave in to the lure of electronic reading and acquired a Kindle. Mine is version 2, which purportedly overcomes some of the limitations that early adopters encountered with the 1.0 edition.

Advantages? It’s intuitive to use, fairly easy to read even in the chancy lighting of airplanes, and it holds 1,500 books. Sure beats schlepping all that paper around in your suitcase.

In the simultaneous-pro-and-con category, you can read in public and nobody has a clue what the subject is. This is a virtue if your fare is some semi-sleazy potboiler that isn’t quite respectable. But if you’re perusing a heavy-duty work of scholarship that is sure to impress everybody in sight, well, no dice with the Kindle.

The real disadvantage is there’s no color. Being both a fine-art enthusiast and a serious amateur photographer, I crave color, especially in illustrations, line art, and graphics. Sheesh, even staid scientific journals are in color these days.

But judging from a recent paper in Nature Photonics (3:5 [May 2009], 292–296), there’s hope on the color horizon. Conventional displays use an electrophoretic technology that works by reconfiguring electrically charged black and white pigments on a substrate. This serves, but page turning is noticeably slow and the contrast is no match for ink and paper.

Collaborators from the University of Cincinnati and the Sun Chemical Corporation developed the new technology and dubbed it electrofluidics. It is water based and thus allows brilliant color pigments, is much faster in page turning, and it has a reflectivity approaching good old paper. It’s even amenable to ultrathin “rollable” substrates, foreshadowing the development of true digital paper in full Technicolor.

So I can’t wait to get my hands on the Kindle 3 (4?, 5?, … ), although I doubt any device will replace the sheer aesthetic impact of seeing, say, the Mona Lisa in person.

Check out the photo-sharing Web site Flickr for an assortment of science and technology advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s. It is wonderfully evocative of the times, both in design and content.

A cold war mentality shows clearly, as well as an uncritical belief in the power of science to solve all human problems. The color and typography are delightfully retro, but one also sees design elements that foreshadow contemporary tastes.

A few of my favorites from the collection:

Martin | Denver, who claim they can create a “total celestial climate” with their engineering solutions. Huh?

A Beckman ad: “How much sass in a glass of lemonade?” What a clever way to draw attention to the simple act of measuring pH in aqueous solutions.

From DuPont: “How Teflon 100 anchors this relay team.” The “relay” is an electrical one for a missile system, and the graphic impact is so ’60s it will make you feel like a hippie.

Fairchild offers “Human Horizons” in an ad that promotes semiconductor technology to create devices for the orthopedically challenged. A forerunner to the Dow “Human Element” campaign?

And then there is Burroughs: “You may be just the man to help squeeze a million transistors into a cubic inch.” It’s blissfully unaware of the modern aversion to sexist language, and hopelessly non-predictive of the hundreds of billions of transistors that could be crammed into a square inch today.

The patent system is designed to give financial incentives to inventors so the rest of us benefit from their efforts. This works pretty well, and the world’s economies—at least in normal times—have flourished because of the innovation promoted by the patent system.

There are flaws, of course. One is the different type of protection needed in the computer/electronics industry compared to biotechnology/pharmaceuticals. In the former, a typical device has a rapid development time and can contain hundreds of separately patented components. In biotech, the commercialization cycle takes many years, and a single patent often holds sway.

The U.S. Congress is currently trying to create a single system that simultaneously meets both needs. Powerful interests are lined up on both sides, so don’t hold your breath.

Another quirk is the patenting of genes and DNA sequences, which many consider to be discoveries, not inventions. It probably wouldn’t have mattered much if Joseph Priestley had patented phlogiston, but imagine if we had to pay a royalty to Antoine Lavoisier, Inc., for every breath of oxygen we drew.

My vote is to disallow patents on discoveries because to do otherwise probably provides an overall disincentive to innovation.

Complicating matters is the results of a recent study from researchers in California and Italy. Meloso et al.  report experiments designed to test whether a patent-based or a market-based system is more effective in encouraging innovation (Science [6 March 2009], pp. 1335–1339).

Guess what? A market-based approach in which participants hold tradable shares proves superior to a patent system that gives exclusive rights to the inventor. This is all theoretical, of course, and doesn’t address the near certainty that context will govern the value of any particular invention.

And even if Meloso et al. are correct in every way, any bets on whether Congress will be influenced?