History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Robbins, Jane
Higher Education Management
University of Pennsylvania - invision-robbins@att.net
Conceptualizing Science as Property: Historical Justifications and Objections to Controlling BioScience
While patenting of life forms is generally considered a recent activity associated with the 1980 U. S. Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty, it has a much longer history. In 1873 Pasteur obtained a method and product patent for a microbe-free yeast, and in the early days of organic chemistry many mammalian hormones were isolated, purified, and patented, including a patent on adrenaline that was contested in court in 1911. In 1930, the Plant Protection Act was passed, allowing patent protection for some forms of plant reproduction. A major revision in the patent statutes in 1952 opened the way for new interpretations, and the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act could be seen as paving the way for Diamond. These trends toward bioscience patents were always controversial; debates over the ownership and use of genetic information and products appear to be merely the latest in a long series of questions over their ethics and risks to both scientific innovation and the public.
This paper will review the heated debates over the patenting of fundamental discoveries in the life sciences, drawn from the records primarily of the American Medical Association and the National Research Council, that took place during the first half of the 20th century as the emerging field of biochemistry began to produce “patentable” results, largely related to medicine. The views in these debates are roughly analogous to and continuous with today’s divisions along economic efficiency/private rights and anticommons/innovation lines. The paper will illustrate, through the patent case law and changes to the statutes over time, the persistence of these two lines of disagreement. It will also show how the law has gradually modified and adjusted to the field of biotechnology to allow for difficulties in such statutory requirements as reduction to practice and nonobviousness, and in general, how the underlying subject-matter question that has evolved over time, “if drugs, why not organisms?,” has been dealt with in the patent law.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006