ABSTRACT
On 9 July 1982 an op-ed piece bearing the title 'Stealing From The Mind' was published in the New York Times. The message of 'Stealing from the Mind' was that governments of other countries were stealing from the minds of individual US inventors by denying them patent protection. Of course by the time evidence came out that individual pharmaceutical companies were stealing from the collective knowledge of indigenous peoples – the collective mind of the non-Western other – the ink had long dried on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Pfizer had managed to create its own turf on the intellectual property issue. As a Pfizer employee pointed out, that is fundamental to winning a campaign on any major issue. The Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations (ACTN) was a pipeline for US business to the US executive on trade issues. ACTN was a direct line of communication between business and the bureaucratic centre of trade policy.
