The patent getting snatched up by cosmetics and then re-discovered almost 50 years later makes me wonder how many cool advancements have been lost to industries that couldn't find any value from them.
Your comment implies that innovation was impeded in other industries because cosmetics "snatched up" the patents. I'm not so sure. Typically, academic and institutional researches DNGA* about patents. As a nascent technology shows commercialization potential, there is incentive for the patent holders to find some way of monetizing. I would imagine (but admittedly do not know) that a cosmetics patent holder would have…
That's not really the problem. The problem is that you have entrepreneurs at the early stages of looking into developing something who discover that it's patented. Just the overhead (paying attorneys) to negotiate a patent license can be thousands of dollars, more if you want to negotiate a good rate. Nobody wants to pay that at Stage 0 before you even do the legwork to determine if there is really a promising product there. But determining that can itself cost many thousands of dollars and nobody wants to do that before knowing they can secure a patent license at a reasonable rate, so you have a chicken and egg problem.
Meanwhile there are many promising alternative avenues of research that aren't already encumbered by patents, so people go there instead and come back when the patent is expired.