| |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Spring Colloquium 2006 Patenting Life and Its Parts: Rights and Ethics in the Political Economy of Intellectual Property Lecture by Daniel Kevles Discussion Moderated by Prof. David Winickoff Place: 22 Warren Hall
“Everything under the sun made by man." With this broad and sweeping statement, the U.S. Supreme Court ushered in a new era in biotechnology. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, a landmark decision in 1980, expanded the subject matter of the United States patent regime to include engineered living organisms that were products of human ingenuity. Since the patenting of Dr. Chakrabarty’s bacteria, there has been a slew of controversial patents on life, including Harvard’s oncomouse, the University of Washington’s oyster, Express Sequence Tags (ESTs), and Myriad Genetics’s control of a genes implicated in breast cancer. This colloquium will explore the history and political of life patents in global context, and discuss future implications. Daniel J. Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, has written extensively about issues in science and society past and present. His many books include Inventing America: A History of the United States (coauthored with Alex Keyssar, Pauline Maier, and Merritt Roe Smith, 2002), The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (W.W. Norton, 1998), and In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Harvard University Press, 1995). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Society of American Historians.
|