The waste of American talent

About a year ago there were news about an American scientist Douglas Prasher whose work in biology led to discoveries worthy of the Nobel prize. He did not get the prize, but the three scientist who did acknowledged his work in their acceptance speeches.

As the story goes, it turned out that Mr. Prasher was not working as a scientist any more. He was driving a Toyota dealership's courtesy bus for $10 per hour.

Well, now we are inundated with "Star" commercials from Intel:

The commercial features Ajay Bhat who the commercial claims was co-inventor of USB - the computer interface standard.

However, the wikipedia entry for Mr. Bhat states that:

"Ajay Bhatt's work on the USB came after the discoveries of Wynn Smith who imagined upstream/downstream in 1990. Wynn was part of Intel's Hunacre group; the group's engineers hold the patent for upstream/downstream which is the idea behind USB. The original USB prototype belongs to Ralph Smith, a Hunacre project engineer."

So, it appears that Mr. Bhat was not the inventor of USB after all. All work was already done before he joined Intel, and it is American engineers who are the inventors.

Neither of the Smiths are featured in any commercials and I am not even sure if they still work for the industry. I just wonder - what kind of menial jobs they perform today?