The Inscription of Life in Law: Genes, Patents, and Bio‐politics

Pottage, Alain

doi:10.1111/1468-2230.00177

Cited by 86 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…Pottage (1998) says that 'The use of a banal doctrinal distinction to disqualify political or ethical objections is quite routine in patent law' (p. 750). In the case of utility, the apparently banal doctrinal understanding of utility in the patenting guidelines is not only open to multiple interpretations, but can also be used to defiect political and ethical objections to patentability and the commercial exploitation of knowledge.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genomic patenting and the utility requirement

Calvert

2004

New Genetics and Society

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This paper analyses the ways in which genomic knowledge is portrayed as useful knowledge in gene patenting in order to fulfil the 'utility'/'industrial applicability' requirement for patentability. It gives examples of utility claims in gene patents and asks whether genomics (as opposed to genetics) changes our ideas about what is useful and what can be patented. It puts forward a provisional classification of different types of utility and argues that merely identifying the physiological function of a gene diverges radically from our commonsense understanding of what it is for an invention to be useful. Furthermore, social, political and ethical issues inevitably arise when discussing the utility requirement, because an invention cannot be useful in isolation from a social context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genomic patenting and the utility requirement

Calvert

2004

New Genetics and Society

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“…As the cell line was discontinuous with the person from whom it derived, it could be regarded as a biological invention and warranting a patent. In the early 1990s, the NIH was actively seeking to patent as many inventions as possible, so Jenkins and Gajdusek felt obliged to apply to the US Patent and Trademark Office to become owners of the cell line, which was preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, in the American Type Culture Collection (Bhat, 1996;Pottage, 1998). 37 The issue of the patent (number 5,397,696) on the Hagahai cell line on 14 March 1995 quickly became a major salient in the struggle against bioprospecting and the commodification of indigenous bodies.…”

Section: Body Commoditiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Objectivity and its discontents

Anderson

2012

Soc Stud Sci

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In my 2008 book, The Collectors of Lost Souls, I told the story of the medical investigation of kuru, a fatal brain disease afflicting the Fore people of New Guinea during the middle of the 20th century. The story involved sorcery accusations, cannibalism, first contact, colonial incursions, scientific rivalry, alleged sexual molestation, and two Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine. There can be little doubt that kuru, because of its peculiarities, has proven exceptionally 'good to think with'-in infectious diseases research, medical anthropology and the history of science. Here, I attempt a cultural history of valuation in kuru research, hoping thus to make a tentative contribution to a theory of value in modern science. It is important to distinguish this project from functionalist and normative analyses predicated on conceptions of social structure and solidarity. Instead, I want to look at the inter-subjective mobilization and modulation of desire in scientific work, thus focusing on multiple agency, more than structure, in the making or perception of value. Like John Dewey, and his teacher Georg Simmel, I am most interested in how experiences of self-formation generate or reveal value commitments; that is, I am interested in how interaction, or opening ourselves to others, can form and make visible our values and valuables. In this spirit, I want to attend to the commitments to subjects and objects that emerge through cultural contact and exchange in scientific research. Keywordsbiomedical science, exchange relations, kuru, material culture, objectivity, value From adolescence, the scientist D. Carleton Gajdusek wondered what made human relations possible: the logistics of social interaction puzzled him. Throughout his scientific career, which he often described as 'medical snooping', Gajdusek obsessively collected blood, body tissues and even young men; yet always he believed, in the words of an acquaintance, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1967: 100), 'that which gives value to an object is its relation to someone else'. Gajdusek had the knack of discerning, in the scientific and other objects he made visible, a phosphorescent glow from decaying past relationships.

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“…Nevertheless, when the bioeconomy is analysed in terms of labour, attention invariably turns to the value created by highly skilled, scientific labour, understood to perform the work of creative innovation necessary to transform biological life into industrial, therapeutic or agricultural processes (Ashish and Gambardella, 1994;Gambardella, 1995). The organization of intellectual property in the life sciences recognizes the cognitive labour of the scientist and the clinician, but not the constitutive nature of the biological material or the collaboration of the donor (Pottage, 1998). It is evident then that the recognition of labour here is structured by a mind/body split, wherein the embodied productivity of the tissue donor does not figure.…”

Section: Labour and The Stem Cell Industriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

From reproductive work to regenerative labour

Waldby

Cooper

2010

Feminist Theory

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The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus ('spare' embryos) or waste (umbilical cord 'afterbirth', cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity. keywords bioeconomy, reproductive biology, reproductive labour debates, stem cell research

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The Inscription of Life in Law: Genes, Patents, and Bio‐politics

Cited by 86 publications

References 0 publications

Genomic patenting and the utility requirement

Genomic patenting and the utility requirement

Objectivity and its discontents

From reproductive work to regenerative labour

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