Cultivating Innovation: Agroecology, Plant Breeding and the Challenge to Intellectual Property Law

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How has the ownership of ideas - 'intellectual property', or IP, as it is now called - shaped the development of science, technology and society? A new, synthetic framework for investigating this vital question was one of the major outcomes of the Leeds-Bristol AHRC 'Owning and Disowning Invention' project. As one of the co-Is on that project, Prof. G. Radick took the lead in developing the framework and also in extending it to reinterpreting historical shifts in the science and practice of plant breeding in Britain in the decades around 1900. It is the aim of this Follow-on Funding project to bring the insights of this research to audiences well placed to benefit from them, in a form that maximises both uptake and utility.At the core of the synthetic framework is a new distinction between IP claims narrowly construed - the familiar legal instruments of patents, trademarks and so on ('IP-narrow') - and other, broader sorts of ownership claims ('IP-broad'), notably claims to have discovered something first ('priority claims') and, on behalf of a discipline, claims that its theoretical principles explain the success of useful techniques and technologies ('productivity claims'). This recognition of intersecting, interacting narrow and broad concepts of IP - and also the potentially destructive tensions they engender - serves to illuminate a range of issues, from the troublesome classification of scientific work as 'pure' or 'applied' to the nature of the public authority of the sciences in our culture. In his own use of this expanded conception of IP in the technosciences, Radick has suggested that, far more than historians have suspected hitherto, the new Mendelian genetics of the early twentieth century depended on the carefully controlled management of the distribution and reputation of putatively Mendelian, and putatively excellent (but in fact highly problematic) plant varieties.This Follow-on project will work in collaboration with the Newbury-based Organic Research Centre (ORC) to create public-facing resources on four specific themes:i) changes in the biological understanding of heredity have coevolved with changes in the economic conditions and marketing of plant varieties. The Owning and Disowning Invention project has opened a rich body of evidence for the further exploration of these problems, which can be used throughout the collaboration with the ORC.ii) the patent regimes under which scientists in different countries operate is related to the likelihood of their producing successful innovations. Currently, the IP system operating across Europe and North America favours some plant breeding methods over others. Attention to the long-run history of IP and plant breeding can stimulate critical thinking about this status quo.iii) typically, in the context of plant breeding in particular and the biosciences in general, IP has been understood as only relating to patents. The differences between mainstream plant breeding methods deriving from the prestige science of molecular biology and alternative methods not so derived presents an ideal setting for analysis making use of the expanded conception of IP in order, again, to promote critical thinking and more creative discussion.iv) the history of plant breeding has been marked by a persistent shift in the location of breeding work, away from the farm and towards the trialling fields of private companies. Understanding these developments requires a focus upon our changed understanding of what plant breeding innovation looks like, and how it might be fostered and protected.This proposed project is modelled closely on a recently funded, Leeds-based AHRC Follow-on Funding project, 'Innovating in Combat: Telecommunications and Intellectual Property in the First World War', partnered with the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford, and led by Prof. G. Gooday, who was PI on the Owning and Disowning Invention project, and Co-I here.