LIVING PROPERTIES:
MAKING KNOWLEDGE AND CONTROLLING OWNERSHIP IN THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY.


An international workshop organized by

Jean-Paul Gaudillière (INSERM, Paris), Daniel Kevles (Yale  
University, New Haven),
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG, Berlin)


Berlin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, May 29th –  
31st, 2008


Call for papers


             The history of intellectual property has drawn  
increasing attention in the history of science. A vast corpus of  
literature including histories of the political, economic, and legal  
frameworks of innovation, histories of particular technologies,  
histories of specific enterprises and their R&D investments have been  
accumulating in recent decades. This literature has addressed the  
development of the world’s patent systems and explored the existence  
of arrangements for intellectual property protection outside the  
patent system such as trade secrets. It has also provided valuable  
information on the norms and understanding of patenting activities  
associated with the production and commercialization of products  
ranging from mechanical devices to therapeutic methods. It has also  
demonstrated that forms of intellectual property are the product of  
fragile compromises that have radically changed through time. Ideas  
of intellectual property and how to protect it have been revealed as  
features of broad systems of political economy, closely connected to  
the production and appropriation of the product itself and expressing  
a variety of means of control, certification and valorization. These  
systems have promoted the establishment of boundaries between private  
and common goods that are both real and historically contested

             Especially important linkages among the worlds of  
science, industry, and law are provided by the history of  
intellectual property protection in living organisms and their parts.  
The patent system of the 19th century, a product of the first  
industrial revolution, was based on the idea that inventions were  
useful creations of processes or of entities that were mechanical or  
chemical in nature. It left many living organisms formally  
unqualified for intellectual property protection: What was the  
utility of a new variety of a fruit or flower? How could an innovator  
define a new breed of sheep in mechanical or chemical terms? Patents,  
as a means of protecting intellectual property in specifically  
identifiable and regularly reproducible inventions, also conflicted  
with ideas concerning the naturalness of plants and animals, their  
variability, the limits of reproducing them identically, , and/or the  
dangers of commercial monopolies on goods such as food or medicines  
essential to the preservation of human life. During the nineteenth  
century and well into the twentieth century, living organisms were  
thus held to be un-patentable.
Nevertheless, while plant and animal breeders did not use the term  
“intellectual property,” they were alive to the concept and they  
devised a variety of arrangements – pricing systems, contracts,  
registries, breed associations, trade secrets – to protect the  
intellectual property in their originations. Patentability first came  
to living organisms – but only asexually reproducible ones -- in the  
United States with the Plant Patent Act, of 1930.  Beginning in the  
1960s, a complementary system of plant breeders’ rights grew up in  
Europe and elsewhere. Beginning in 1980, the increasing understanding  
of life as specific, manipulated forms of chemistry led to the  
expansion of the biotechnological industries and to the establishment  
around the world of intellectual property protection through patents  
to virtually all living organisms and their parts, save for human  
beings. Patents have become common and normal ways of controlling and  
commercializing the biological entities that figure in the  
laboratory, the nursery, the farm, the factory, and the clinic.  All  
these developments and their impacts have begun to receive historical  
attention, but a great deal remains to be learned about  
appropriation, collective ownership and intellectual property  
protection in living organisms and related technologies in food and  
pharmaceutical during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

             A long term aim of this workshop is therefore to  
encourage the formation and development of a network of scholars  
actively engaged with the history of innovation and ownership in  
living organisms and related medical and food technologies. Its  
immediate aim is to enlarge our knowledge of the processes by which  
innovations in and bearing on living entities have or have not  
achieved the status of invention and protected intellectual property,  
both through the patent systems of the world and outside them. It is  
essential to historicize our understanding of the changes associated  
with the present world of DNA-based biotechnology and genomics and to  
do so in the different nations and multinational organizations in  
which these changes have occurred. A second aim of the workshop is to  
look at the relationship between these changing forms of  
appropriation and the dynamics of biological research since the  
beginning of the 19th century. Although the question has been barely  
analyzed, it is a reasonable hypothesis that such appropriation has  
played an important role in the history of the life sciences.  
Knowledge and appropriation have often been co-constructed. If our  
ways of conceptualizing, representing, and manipulating life have  
determined the ways in which intellectual property in living goods  
has been defended, the opposite is in all probability also true. The  
maintenance of large collections of plant varieties by horticultural  
firms and governments relate not only to trademarks or certificates  
of innovation, but also to natural history as a way of knowing and to  
breeding as way of producing. In a similar vein, emerging interests  
in the study of metabolic pathways during the 1920s and 1930s were  
nurtured by the research activities of pharmaceutical firms using the  
patentability of chemical processes to control the commercialization  
of vitamins or hormones.

             In order to shed new light on these issues, the workshop  
will focus on how knowledge of and innovations in living organisms  
and related technologies have been realized and how the products  
achieved identification and protection as intellectual property in  
the market place. Four forms of knowledge and innovation will be  
given due consideration: a) natural history and classification with  
its attendant collections, mutual gifts, certificates and trademarks;  
b) the breeding of plants and animals; c) experimental biology (i.e.  
genetic, bacteriology and biochemistry) with its growing ability to  
manipulate and patent  “pure” organisms, molecules or metabolic  
pathways; and d) modern biotechnology with its emphasis on sequences,  
broadened intellectual property rights, and upstream control of life  
“itself”.

Case studies – eventually comparative across time and place - are  
especially welcomed. They may investigate various objects, including  
but not limited to:
the trajectory of a certain type of commodity revealing the interplay  
between different forms of appropriation, i.e. trade secrets, trade  
associations, technical monopolies, trademarks, certificates, and  
patents;
public controversies that resulted in significant changes of  
intellectual property laws;
the legal processes, i.e. patent office deliberations or court cases,  
that have had a pivotal role in the development of jurisprudence  
about intellectual property;
the activities of academic institutions or private firms involved in  
R&D and in the capture and management  of the property rights in the  
results;
the systems of exchange, distribution and collective access such as  
UPOV certification that have historically been juxtaposed with or  
opposed to patents.

Proposals in the form of an abstract are due November 1st 2007.  
Decisions will be made during the following weeks. Proposals should  
be sent in electronic form to both Daniel J. Kevles at Yale  
([log in to unmask]) and Jean-Paul Gaudillière at INSERM  
([log in to unmask]). The organizing institutions will cover travel  
costs and accommodation for the invited participants.