- Few members of the United States Congress have had a more lasting impact on the lives we live today than Indiana's own Birch Bayh.

Here's just one example.

(gentle music) In 1978, when Marvella Bayh was suffering her final bout of cancer, she and her husband, Senator Birch Bayh, found out that technology existed that might have made her life easier.

But because of federal regulations, that new, compassionate technology was not available to her.

So begins that story of Senator Bayh's final piece of landmark legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act.

- In a nutshell, to describe Bayh-Dole is that the patent law in this country was operating that if the federal government had any money in the development of a patent or copyright at a college or university or small business, the federal government assumed for itself the first rights to bring it to market.

- But all too often, the federal government didn't bring the new technology to market, but it didn't release it to the college or small business either.

So it sat on the shelf doing no one any good.

- American innovation, which had always led the world, was falling behind.

- [Instructor] Senator Bayh, a Democrat, reached out to a Republican colleague, Kansas senator Bob Dole, and together they crafted new legislation meant to break up the federal roadblock, letting colleges and small businesses bring their innovations to the market and to the people who needed them.

- And so Bayh-Dole was an effort to basically give those rights back to the university, small businesses, and colleges that were developing these partially federally funded innovations.

One company that got formed under the new Bayh-Dole environment, Google.

- More recently, the Bayh-Dole Act made possible the mRNA vaccine technology that, in record time, allowed for the development of vaccines for COVID-19.

The Bayh-Dole Act, "Possibly the most inspired piece of legislation "to be enacted in America over the past half-century," declared The Economist magazine.

And a fitting final act for Senator Bayh.

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