You Can Buy a Piece of a Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery

Berkeley will auction NFTs of invention disclosure forms filed by the creators of CRISPR and cancer immunotherapy.

How much will someone be willing to pay for a few pages of quarter-century-old bureaucratic university paperwork that have been turned into a blockchain-encoded piece of digital art? The University of California, Berkeley, hopes quite a bit, and it is about to find out. Berkeley announced on Thursday that it will auction the first of two digital art pieces known as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, next week. The object being offered is based on a document called an invention and technology disclosure. That’s the form that researchers at Berkeley fill out to alert the university about discoveries that have potential to be turned into lucrative patents.