of those points in the desirability of a restructuring of the Patent Office and should it be an independent agency? My conscience is clear to the extent that we are authorized to take testimony, including the experience you related, as it bears on that one item and that is the independent agency question. The hearings were not authorized to investigate the circumstances of your dismissal.

So, I welcome your turning now to the general observations that you will make with respect to the provisions for an independent office and I think all of us would understand that your general observations necessarily are colored by the circumstances that you have just described.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Thank you, Senator. I turn now to matters that are a little easier for me to discuss.

I think I must say that the Patent System which is of great concern to us all, has been my life work for more than 40 years. I believe in our patent system. I have said many times that I think it is sound in principle, morally right and extremely important. I am totally dedicated to it because I believe it does for this country what we need to have done. I think it is not doing it as well as it should. I am very anxious and concerned to improve it. This has been the thrust of my activities in the Patent Office.

I am very much in sympathy with the drive to accomplish, at long last, some of the things that we have begun, increasingly, to recognize as necessary and important. In my own work in the Patent office I have tried to act accordingly to my own conviction that there is a need to ventilate and to make more effective, the entire patent examining procedure. We have made a start, within the limits of time and in the absence of legislation, toward the interpartes proceeding. We have initiated efforts that concern completeness of file wrapper, to break down the barriers of secrecy that properly and understandably infuriate and puzzle so many. What I am saying is that as we approach patent legislation, I find it a source of gratification that we can anticipate the early reporting of a patent bill long overdue and much needed.

I believe in the importance of improving the system. I think that legislation is required. I am enthusiastic about the prospects of having a better patent system based on better legislation.

But before I address myself directly to the matter of the independent agency, Senator, I think that there is a preliminary question that needs to be considered. I think we have to recognize that the difficulties experienced with the patent system, with which we are all familiar, and which we are trying to correct, are not to be attribnted-certainly not in their totality-to shortcomings in our present legislative structure. And by the same sign, I think it would be quite a mistake to suppose that by the enactment of appropriate patent legislation these difficulties would necessarily be resolved. Not so. Something more-something far more basic-is required.

As I view it, that something is good administration-stability, the ability to do the job, to do it well, and to do it consistently. One of the things that Senator McClellan commented on in his remarks introducing S. 1957 was the fact that during his tenure as chairman of this subcommittee there had been five Commissioners of Patents;

and he was concerned, quite properly about the high turnover and the short tenure with respect to the Commissioners' position. In my 3 years in the Patent Office there were of course two Commissionersbut there were three Secretaries, and there were four people in the position of Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology.

Senator HART. Over what period?

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Three years. With every change in personnel, with every change in policy, in the Department of Commerce, shock waves permeated and had their impact on the Patent Office. We had to react to the new personalities. We had to react to the new programs. We had to participate in a different way and about different things.

So against that factual background, which indicates the general instability of the situation, I would turn to this matter of administration, which I consider to be absolutely vital, and which I think is inadequately understood and appreciated and all too often overlooked.

I was very gratified, earlier in the course of these proceedings, to note the committee's sensitivity in these very areas. The inquiries appropriately directed to such things as the quota system, for example, are not within the five points listed, but bear most importantly on the very essence of what the patent examining function is all about. There can be no mistake about it, the patent examining function is the raison d'etre of the Patent Office, and the Patent Office is the very heart of the patent system.

As a matter of administrative efficiency, I think we would all agree that good communications are very important. In that connection, I was interested to note the sensitivity and the insight of the committee as reflected by its interest in probing the disparities which seemed to appear between the views taken by the management of the Patent Office and the Department of Commerce on the one hand, and the Patent Office examiners themselves on the other. I felt, and perhaps others did, that that was rather significant. It pointed up something I have experienced, and that is the compartmentalization of thought and of action in the Patent Office in every respect-the preoccupation with self and one's own functions, the inability to see the large picture, and to understand the goals and to cooperate in the accomplishment of the Patent Office mission. It is these precise things to which I have been directing during my tenure my primary attention. These are the things in which I have been placing primary emphasis. It is most important to understand that when you ask questions having to do with the existence or nonexistence of a quota system and try, as apparently you did Senator, for 2 days and fail to get a satisfactory response, it is indicative of a situation which applies to more questions than just the one then under

consideration.

The Patent Office is a wonderful institution. It is hard for me to put in words the feeling as well as the regard I have for it and what it has meant to this country. Perhaps that is the reason that I am so very disturbed, as I have been from time to time, by the seeming indifference or the seeming opaqueness of individuals who play important roles in what it does, who are all too often inclined to

think of themselves as performers of daily tasks rather than as people contributing importantly to the achievement of national goals. One of the lines that I have used repeatedly in my efforts to reach the employees of the Office has been that we are not to think of ourselves as laying bricks but as building a cathedral.

Now there have been remarkable changes in personnel attitudes. and in morale and this has been very important in achieving the kind of administration on which the successful operation of a Patent Office depends. I would be the last to discount and the first to praise the importance of the professional input at the Patent Office. But it is a fact of life that the professionals' tasks cannot be well performed unless the support functions are carried out adequately. It is rather ridiculous to expect the public to have confidence in a Patent Office which can't deliver documents as promised, which have been ordered and paid for which purports to issue patents on a certain day, and which cannot make copies of them available for weeks after their official date of issue-an office in which files are lost, literally, so that they cannot become available for the further processing of the claims that are so important to the applicants who filed them. It was a Patent Office of that kind which I encountered, and it was to overcome difficulties of those and many other kinds to which I directed my efforts. It is against that kind of background that I speak with feeling to the matter of the importance of administration.

It seems to me-I might say that these remarks from which I will read in an attempt to conserve the time of the committee at this point were prepared in a totally personal and totally different context and they have no relationship to the totally unanticipated appearance I am making before this committee this morning. But it seemed to me that what I said then is what I would in any event say to this committee now.

I was saying that we need to look beyond legislation to good administration. At the very least, I would say this requires close, critical, and continuing scrutiny of, first, the tools, the skill, and the procedures employed in the operations of the Patent Office; second, the criteria used to measure product quality and examiner performance; and third, the motivational and the attitudinal factors affecting performance of the professional and support personnel. Such review must be supplemented by appropriate remedial action; and the process of review and improvement must be pursued relentlessly. Some progress along these lines has been made, but much more remains to be done if the integrity and effectiveness of any form of patent examination process is to be insured.

Consider, as an example, the admittedly unacceptable state of the critically important Patent Office search files. Now, it is extremely important to recall that the search files in the U.S. Patent Office are unique. This is the only place in the country where classified files which permit an effective and efficient search can be found. Files exist elsewhere but they are not comparable in scope or in arrangement or in effectiveness. A peculiar responsibility rests upon the Patent Office therefore to insure the completeness, the integrity, and the effectiveness of those files.

The programs which were recently instituted-and I mean within the last 2 years to check the integrity, that is the completeness of the files and to correct their deficiencies, represent the first such efforts in 25 years. Now there has been a lot of discussion of legislation in the last 25 years, but precious little consideration of so vital an issue as that.

Similarly the revitalization of the reclassification effort in respect to these files, which I started early in 1972, was long overdue. Its completion will require several years of sustained and substantial effort.

Now earlier reference has been made in the course of these hearings to the matter of classification. Let me add one thought that I think has not been expressed. As technology develops rapidly in the areas that are currently of greatest importance, there is an increased output, at a greater rate, of new technical information. Unless the inflow of new technical information at the Patent Office is classifie promptly and effectively, it becomes increasingly difficult to mak the kind of efficient and effective search on which a good patent examination depends. Now it was a little while before I realized. after I had entered the Patent Office, that the work of maintaining this ongoing and highly important reclassification effort had been abandoned virtually completely. The result was that the examiners were, day by day and week by week, in a deteriorating position with respect to the performance of their mission. The funds appropriated for that purpose in the normal course were, as we say, reprogramed in order to sustain a research and development effort aimed at developing a computerized system for performing the essential work of classifying new technical information.

I suppose I might be permitted a digression at this point to go back and say that one of the factors contributing to the request for my resignation might well have been the fact that in trying to remedy problems of this kind I probably made few friends and most certainly must have made some enemies. There were people who were deeply committed to these projects and who failed, I think, to share my view that some of them had to be reconsidered.

This matter of computerized reclassification is certainly a case in point. I found it was essential in order to preserve the effectiveness of the Patent Office-to prevent the patent examining function in my judgment from going down the drain-to abandon that, and to revi talize this "manual," as we call it, classification effort. In the process I had to relieve from his position (and to eliminate the position) one person in the office who at the time held the title of an Assistant Commissioner. That caused him great pain and discomfort. In time I also suffered considerable pain and discomfort, and also some annoyance, and diversion of a very substantial amount of time in responding to letters from many sources including members of the Congress protesting on his behalf

Mr. BRENNAN. Mr. Chairman, I feel compelled to request you to request the witness to direct his comments to the issues which are relevant to this proceeding. I think we are going far afield here. Mr. GOTTSCHALK. I'm sorry.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Thank you. I appreciate that.

In any event, unless these basic tools, through continuing efforts to maintain them up-to-date and in good working order, are brought to and maintained in a condition permitting effective and efficient examination, nobody, under any system-not the examiner, nor the public counsel nor anyone else will be able to make reliable and meaningful determinations of novelty. And such determinations are the very bedrock on which all aspects of our system depend.

Similarly, if the rules of the game by which patent examiners work, and if the criteria by which their performance is judged and their promotions and salary increases are awarded, are such as to favor quantity of production over quality of work product, concepts of professionalism and quality will be subjected to a compromising strain which poses a constant and substantial threat to the proper performance of the Patent Office mission. That kind of a system provides powerful incentives to do the wrong things rather than the right things.

I would say, on the basis of my own experience and in terms of such basic administrative matters as those to which I have referred, that strength of administration, stability of administration, and soundness of administration can best be insured in a situation which would make the Patent Office independent of the Commerce Depart

ment.

Now Mr. Browne traced very accurately and interestingly yesterday the history of the Patent Office, and this committee has been informed that there is no evidence that the Patent Office at any time. has been subjected to any improper influence in the performance of its mission. I feel constrained to deny this for, on the basis of my experience, I know this not to be so. I accept as valid the observation that there has been over the years an apparent inability of the Department of Commerce to develop and maintain an effective. working relationship with the Patent Office, and I don't think that we can anticipate any significant improvement in this kind of relationship if the formal structure were to remain as it is-and that seems to have been the position proposed by the administration yesterday.

Now that position rests largely on the basis of the Commerce Department being able to provide administrative and similar support, which the Patent Office would have to provide for itself if it were independent. Fine. That argument has merit as far as it goes, but there is another side of the story, too. And that is, that because of the family relationship there are corresponding burdens. I have already indicated that with every shift in the administration or in administration policy, the burdens of the Patent Office are enhanced. There is another aspect to this thing that bothers me very considerably. I don't think many people, inside or outside of the Patent Office, are aware that regularly substantial sums of money appropriated for the Patent Office are siphoned off for other uses within the Department of Commerce. That is bad enough, but I think that the seriousness of that threat is underscored by a very recent development. This year for the first time-I think this is not inappropriate for disclosure for the purposes of this committee and I hope I am