Scholars Award: A History of Innovation and Ownership in Living Matter

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The PI requests funding to complete a book tentatively titled Vital Properties: A History of Innovation and Ownership in Living Matter. The book is a history of innovations in living organisms and their parts (e.g., plants, animals, microorganisms, and human genes), and of efforts to protect the intellectual property that they embody; it spans from the late eighteenth century to the present. The innovations include breeding practices and the acquisition and introduction into the market of new types of animals and plants from imports as well as, in the case of fruit trees and vines, chance finds in the fields. It also includes new plant varieties devised in agricultural experiment stations and of genetically modified organisms and human genes that have arisen in academic laboratories and have been licensed to biotechnology companies. Vital Properties will be the first book to deal comprehensively with its subject and the first to treat innovation in living organisms in relation not only to the patent protection that has come to cover them but also to the arrangements for intellectual property protection that were devised outside that system in the United States from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. It will constitute a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarly work that seeks to historicize intellectual property for a broad range of technologies and contextualize its development in the evolving political and legal economy from the early modern period to the present. The book will be written for both general and scholarly audiences and will likely be of interest to historians, policymakers, IP lawyers, and analysts of entrepreneurship, agriculture, biomedicine, and globalization. It will be published by a prominent trade publisher, and will thus reach out to a larger public. It will have substantial potential to affect understanding of, and perhaps even policy debates on, the relation of intellectual property to innovation and entrepreneurship in a competitive national and globalizing economy. It will also throw into historical perspective thereby help clarify or at least contextualize contemporary debates over the control of intellectual property in the food and biomedical sectors with regard to equity between countries in the developed North and the developing South; it will also do so with regards to IP-related issues concerning access to the products of high-technology biomedical research such as pharmaceuticals and the tools of genetic diagnosis. Funds for this project were provided by a joint venture of the BIO and SBE directorates known as "Impacts of Biology on Society," which is administered via the STS program.