An Exploration into Law and Narratives: The Case of Intellectual Property Law of Biotechnology (original) (raw)
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JILS_The Inscription of Law in Life- Intellectual Property and commodification of life
Journal of Indian Law and Society, 2022
With innovation in genetic engineering now being rewarded in the form of intellectual property rights, there are new things that are beginning to count as property and as objects of human invention—plant varieties, seeds, germplasm, genetic sequences, DNA, and so on. To bring the realm of “biology” within the ambit of intellectual property, to juridify aspects of the biological as products of human invention is to bring new epistemic objects into visibility. While these are revealed through practices of biotechnology, law translates it into a capacity for monopolistic appropriation for biotech innovators. The new correlatives of innovation and intellectual property re-engineer not just the biology of an organism, but the very categories that organised property and intellectual property. What instrumentalities of technology and law co-produce biotic property? I examine these instrumentalities in a two-paper series: while the first paper seeks to lay out the work of technology in the creation of new biological artefacts, and consequently new economic spaces and property claims, the second paper seeks to examine the role of law in translating inventive claims as property claims.
Journal of Indian Law and Society, 2022
With innovation in genetic engineering now being rewarded in the form of intellectual property rights, there are new things that are beginning to count as property and as objects of human invention—plant varieties, seeds, germplasm, genetic sequences, DNA, and so on. To bring the realm of “biology” within the ambit of intellectual property, to juridify aspects of the biological as products of human invention is to bring new epistemic objects into visibility. While these are revealed through practices of biotechnology, law translates it into a capacity for monopolistic appropriation for biotech innovators. The new correlatives of innovation and intellectual property re-engineer not just the biology of an organism, but the very categories that organised property and intellectual property. What instrumentalities of technology and law co-produce biotic property? I examine these instrumentalities in a two-paper series: while the first paper seeks to lay out the work of technology in the creation of new biological artefacts, and consequently new economic spaces and property claims, the second paper seeks to examine the role of law in translating inventive claims as property claims.
The Hastings law journal
This article considers how certain ideas underlying the tort of appropriation may enable use more effectively to deal with the problems presented by a case such Moore v. Regents of the University of California which dealt with property rights of Moore’s spleen cells. First, the author explores how the tort of appropriation of identity opens up new approaches to inform and perhaps supplement principles of property law as a guide to managing genetic information or other materials that seem intimately bound up with a particular human subject. Secondly, the author analyzes how the various opinions produced by the Supreme Court implicitly elaborate a powerful and problematic relation between the spheres of private life, science and the market, such that the science is granted special status and power relative to the other two – or rather, how the Supreme Court effectively exploits the social status of science to expand the reach of the market into the private sphere of control over the b...
The Place of Civil Law in Biotechnology
Global Bioethics, 2004
Biolaw is an autonomous interdisciplinary legal discipline, with great theoretical and practical relevance because of its possible social effects. This contribution deal with the most relevant different approaches to bioethical problems according to the main juridical systems, as they are civil law and common law. A main topic is also the relation between Biolaw, Bioethics and Biopolitics Biolaw as a new law for biomedicine and biotechnology Biolaw or Biomedical-Sciences-Law encompasses the legal implications of the socalled biomedical sciences and biotechnology as it affects the human being and, therefore, all living things (animals and plants). Biolaw has been enlarging its focus progressively, forced by the great development of Biomedical Sciences, but probably also influenced by the development of Bioethics. Due to the enlargement of its field, biolaw has substituted and absorbed traditional medical law, which with a narrower point of view, is in charge of the legal aspects related to the practice of medicine. Consequently, medical law has been dealing with the professional relations between physicians and health organizations, patients, healthcare users (public or private), with other health professionals, and, especially, with the legal responsibilities that could be derived from such relations (generally due to carelessness or medical malpractice). As we can see, biolaw reverses the perspective: the focus is on the human being as the addressee (in all aspects of his origins and biological evolution) and, therefore, as the potential receiver of the benefits or damages, in the affection of his rights and legal goods, of biomedical sciences, that is, not only medicine but also, biology, biochemistry, biophysics, as well as biotechnologies. On the other hand, in extending the field to all living things, biolaw must also deal with the equilibrium of natural systems, the protections of all living things (the manipulation of genetically modified micro organisms, animal experimentation, cloning, transgenic animal and plant production and so on) and specifically
The Detail of Law Relating to Modern Biotechnology
2004
The ability of science to operate effectively within society is dependant on a number of factors. Science is totally reliant on the law for its regulation and control, while the boundaries in which science can operate are governed by legal constraints. These boundaries are strongly influenced by society which dictates acceptable levels of morals and ethics in which science can operate. Economic factors must be considered as industry requires reward in order to recoup its research and development investments and continue competing in a competitive and growing market place. Thus the law must reconcile the different tensions raised by science, economics, politics, society and the law itself. This paper looks how this may be achieved at the international, regional and national level.
Highlighting the Course of Biotech Law
Genetic engineering & biotechnology news, 2011
August 1981 the National Law Journal proclaimed that "Genetic Engineering Creates a New Breed of Lawyer." Fascinated by the headline, I devoured the article even though it didn't say anything about artificial android attorneys. Rather, it reported that the previous year's Chakrabarty decision by the U.S. Supreme Court had helped to unzip the wallets of venture capitalists, funding a field of startup companies hoping to commercialize a cornucopia of wonders conceived in the labs of molecular biologists. I The article identified a handful of lawyers spearheading these developments, and went on to quote a publisher who had recently planted an acorn in this fertile firmament. That publisher, of course, was Mary Ann Liebert, and the acorn was GEN, then too a start-up. Tracking her down by phone (not in the proverbial garage, but her Manhattan apartment) I introduced myself as aspiring to join the "new breed" of genetic engineering lawyers I'd just read about. Having taken a seminar in nucleic acid biochemistry while a graduate student at Stanford, then having become both a patent attorney and an antitrust lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice, I figured I was as qualified as anybody. Coincidentally, the nativity of biotechnology patent law was just around the corner and Mary Ann was prescient enough to engage me to report on it. The first-ever training on the subject for patent practitioners was a seminar on "Genetically Engineered Microorganisms and Cells: The Law and Business" that Irving Kayton produced in New York City in 1981.
Living in technical legality: science fiction and law as technology
Griffith law review, 2019
with feminist philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, and, on one occasion, Judith Butler, he also offers readings of various science fiction worksfrom literary texts to movies, TV-shows, and even video games. The monstrosity is also evident in his demonstration of how the theory and practice of law cannot escape the fact that law and technology are inseparable. This, he argues, leads to the urgency of developing alternative cartographies and myths that enable legal subjects, lawyers, and scholars to become responsible when creating legal-technological networks of "living well" (p. 127) within what, relying on Heidegger, he calls "the total triumph of technology" (p. 1 and 3) in the modern West. The book is divided into two parts, bookended by an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction delineates an approach that deliberately departs from what has been commonly understood as "law in literature." Tranter builds on William P. MacNeil's argument in Lex Populi by demonstrating how "seemingly lawless texts" (p. 8) are nonetheless concerned with core legal concepts, and develops this approach further by extending the discussion to "legal technicity." He shows how lawits operations, its technicality, its symbolic functions, and its potential violencecan be found in texts and media that at first glance might appear devoid of law and legal issues. In the first part of the book (Chapters 1-3), Tranter outlines what he means by "technical legality," preparing the ground for the book's second part. Chapter 1 demonstrates how Dolly the sheep and the Frankenstein myth together shaped not only the discourse of law and technology, but also concrete legislation processes. Relying on Schmitt, Tranter draws a line from legal positivism to legal technicity in order to demonstrate how law itself became a species of technology. In Chapter 2, he builds on Hobbes, Schmitt, and Heidegger in order to read Frank Herbert's Dune cycle, drawing out a notion of sovereignty that shares its main characteristics with what he understands as legal technicity: a monopoly on time (timelessness) and death as the consumption of bare life. Chapter 3
Science and technology require an intervention by the law, and law is called upon to intervene in front of their evolution, and to look for proper solutions of governance and rational responses to their risks. One of the main issues to be investigated from the legal viewpoint is represented by the 'dual-use dilemma' that arises both in 'traditional' and new areas of techno-sciences. Indeed, any kind of research has the potential to be used both for bad as well as for good purposes. Therefore, it is important to reflect upon the ways to control possibly dangerous research without preventing the progress from going further. Such 'dual-use dilemma', then, entails the study of one of the fundamental freedoms in the biolaw area: the freedom of scientific research, its limits, and relationship with other rights/needs/freedoms (such the need of security). This work focuses on two areas of the techno-scientific world. One is more 'traditional', i.e. nuclear science, in whose context the reflections on 'dual-use' were born and developed, and the other one is a new emerging technology, which is synthetic biology. The aim is to understand how the freedom of scientific research could be shaped in relationship with other rights/needs/interests for dealing with 'dual-use' issues in the aforementioned areas of science and technology.