History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Klaus Hoeyer, Mette Hartlev, Lene Kock
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Stem Cells, Ownership and other entitlement
"Please remember that patents are not the same as ownership! We do not want to circulate such sad misunderstandings in a debate like this." With this sort of remark the vice-president of the European Group of Ethics opened a recent international conference in Copenhagen on the ethics of patenting human genes and stem cells. Legal technicalities were presented as essential to an enlightened debate about ethics and thus used to frame what concerns that could be raised and how. Reflecting on this type of discursive regulation this paper sets out to discuss the ethical, theoretical and methodological challenges facing the analyst who wishes to enhance the understanding of the distribution of rights in stem cell sources, stem cell lines, and stem cell products. How are we to approach the ostensibly simple question: who may do what with stem cells? It is argued that the notion of entitlements might be useful to relate and assess the emergence of multiple forms of rights ranging from so-called ethical rights to informed consent, over practical enforcement of biobank standards and requirements in administrative law, to existing intellectual property rights and commercial exploitations. A careful study of the emerging entitlements in stem cells might also stimulate a critical appraisal of the ambiguities of the property concept as they prevail even within legal discourse.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006