Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Patenting Life:
Innovation and Controversy in the Political Economy of Patent Law

Daniel J. Kevles

Professor of History
Yale University

Since the late 1970s, patents have been issued on living organisms and their parts, including microorganisms, plants, animals, and genes. These developments enjoy strong support in a number of quarters, including the biotechnology industry, the biomedical sector of academia, and university technology transfer offices. However, they have also stimulated widespread dissent in the academy and among patients' rights groups, religious groups, and social activists. Part of the dissent is ethical, a consideration that has no place in U.S. patent law but does explicitly in European patent law. The lecture explores the evolution of the issue in global context and the merits of what has been claimed to be at stake in it.

About the Lecturer

Daniel J. Kevles writes about issues in science and society past and present. He is the author most recently of The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character and a coauthor of Inventing America: A History of the United States. His previous books include In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity and The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in scholarly and popular journals, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Kevles received his B.A. in physics and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. From 1964 to 2001, he taught at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the Koepfli Professor of Humanities and directed the Program in Science, Ethics, and Public Policy. In 2001 he joined the faculty of Yale University where he is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History and also teaches a course on the engineering and ownership of life in the Law School. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Society of American Historians, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His works have been honored with a National Historical Society Prize, a Page One Award, and the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. In 2001 he received the Society's George Sarton Medal for career achievement.

More Information

http://www.law.yale.edu/outside/html/faculty/dk244/profile.htm

Daniel J. Kevles