Esther Takeuchi has over 150 patents. She’s actually not exactly sure how many there are (some have continued being issued while others have expired), but it’s somewhere between 150 and 160. Regardless of the exact number, Takeuchi currently holds the title of the American woman with the most patents, and in 2011 was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. Most of her patents are for technologies that make our batteries better. In fact, Takeuchi’s first big breakthrough was in medical batteries—the kinds that go into heart defibrillators. More recently, Takeuchi’s lab at Stony Brook University was awarded a grant to do some fundamental research into how batteries work, in an effort to cut down the amount of heat they produce and, in turn, make them more efficient.

I spoke with Takeuchi about invention, being a woman in the lab, and how new technology has opened up a whole new world of batteries.

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Rose Eveleth: Let’s start with the medical battery. How did you come up with that?

Esther Takeuchi: I was working in a company at the time, and the implantable cardiac defibrillator had been demonstrated, so it had actually been shown to be an effective concept, and a life-saving concept. And it did have a battery at the time. They were using a battery at the time to demonstrate that the concept would work. But it turned out that the battery that was initially used only lasted maybe a year or a year and a half, and the goal was to target approximately five years. Because in order to replace the battery you’d need to do surgery and replace the whole device, and surgery every year for someone who has heart disease to begin with is just not a good idea.

So it was very much a targeted, or goal-oriented undertaking, where we had an idea of what we were trying to accomplish and then worked towards that goal. I would say initially it was based on insight coupled with experimentation. There were ideas about what materials might be reasonable to try for this type of battery and then it was a question of demonstrating it and saying “yeah this really does look like it’s going to work.” Then can we take those initial observations and tests and push them towards a product that could actually be used in an implantable defibrillator. So I think it was a series of steps that led to the final outcome, but like I said there was a well-defined goal from the beginning. We knew what we were aiming for.

Eveleth: Does that experience with the medical battery inform your current work on battery technology?

Takeuchi: I think it really does in a sense. Every new idea can be built on previous things that we’ve seen, or remembered, or tried, or read. I’m not sure who said this quote, but there’s a quote that says, “It’s like seeing what everybody has seen before but thinking something different than what people have thought before.” That’s really kind of what invention is. The same information is out there for everybody, it’s a question of how do you combine the pieces together to lead to a new insight that will allow you to solve a problem or address and issue in a way that nobody has done before. That’s really what invention is.

I do think your prior experience, your knowledge base, your ability to take pieces of information, maybe even from different areas, and put them together in a new way.

The other thing I’ll add is that I think curiosity and passion for the field really help. You’ve got to be kind of excited or driven or want to do it. You can’t be lazy about it, you really have to be mentally active to make it all happen.

Eveleth: At what moment do you know when you’ve got something that’s patentable?

Takeuchi: It is really important to know the field that you’re working in, you have to know what you’re doing and what everybody else is doing. Being knowledgeable is a key step. But the next step is to look at the patent literature. What has been patented, what are the applications are out there now? That's all information that’s available on the patent office website. Then you have to verify that what you have is something different, unique, from what is out there. If you’re an expert in your own field, then you have a sense for what the state of the knowledge is, you have insight into whether what you’re working on is new or different. That would be certainly a requirement for being patentable. It has to be something different, something new.

Eveleth: Some people argue that the U.S. patent system is broken, and that it issues far too many patents for things that are too broad. Do you think that’s true?

Takeuchi: Patents really are very important, especially for small companies or inventors. They can make a difference in terms of economic feasibility and survivability, because it allows them to defend and practice their invention for a period of time, for some period of time, before everybody else starts practicing what their idea was. So I do think patents are really important. I will also say that it’s a tremendous challenge. The world is so complex these days, and to ensure that every patent that is filed is fully unique and yet sufficiently described to be practiced by practitioners in that field is really a difficult thing to do. I have to credit the people in that area. It’s a challenging thing to do well. Could it be made better? Possibly, but we shouldn’t back away from it, I think we should keep striving to improve it and make it sure it continues to be a functioning piece of our society.