ABSTRACT

This chapter talks about patents because one of the surest ways to do biotechnology differently is to do away with patent system. Defensive patenting is a strategy whereby patents are taken out either to ensure that a firm can continue work in an area or to head-off a competitor by blocking their future research. Research indicates that as firms increase in size they become adverse to radical innovations as socio-technical inertia forms behind established R&D streams. Non-market mechanisms, such as open publication, personal communication networks, and collaboration between technology users and producers, may be more efficient and cost effective when it comes to making sticky knowledge mobile. Governments already heavily support genomic sciences. South Korea, for example, with annual R&D expenditures totaling US$727.4 million, leads the world in such funding. Political theory often speaks of politics as involving only subjects. The vulgarities of materiality-of emotion, impulse and other corporeal activities-have no place, it has long been argued, in reasoned discourse.