Scholars Award: A History of Innovation and Ownership in Living Matter

PI请求资金来完成一本暂定名为《重要属性：生命物质的创新和所有权史》的书。这本书是生物有机体及其部分（例如，植物，动物，微生物和人类基因）的创新历史，以及保护它们所体现的知识产权的努力；它从18世纪晚期一直延续到现在。这些创新包括育种实践和从进口获取并向市场引进新型动植物，就果树和葡萄藤而言，还包括在田间偶然发现的品种。它还包括在农业实验站设计的新植物品种，以及在学术实验室中产生的转基因生物和人类基因，这些品种已被授权给生物技术公司。《生命属性》将是第一本全面探讨这一主题的书，也是第一本不仅将生物的专利保护与之联系起来，而且将知识产权保护安排与美国从19世纪初到20世纪中期在该体系之外设计的知识产权保护安排联系起来的书。它将对越来越多的学术工作做出重大贡献，这些学术工作旨在将各种技术的知识产权历史化，并将其发展置于从近代早期到现在不断发展的政治和法律经济的背景下。这本书将面向普通读者和学术读者，可能会引起历史学家、政策制定者、知识产权律师以及企业家精神、农业、生物医学和全球化分析人士的兴趣。它将由一家著名的行业出版商出版，因此将接触到更多的公众。在竞争激烈的国家经济和全球化经济中，知识产权与创新和企业家精神的关系将有很大的潜力影响人们对这一关系的理解，甚至可能影响政策辩论。它还将从历史的角度出发，从而有助于澄清或至少将当代关于北方发达国家与南方发展中国家之间公平的粮食和生物医学部门知识产权控制的辩论置于背景之下；它还将在与知识产权有关的问题上这样做，这些问题涉及获得高技术生物医学研究产品，如药品和遗传诊断工具。这个项目的资金是由生物学部和SBE学部的一个名为“生物学对社会的影响”的合资企业提供的，该项目由STS项目管理。

The PI requests funding to complete a book tentatively titled Vital Properties: A History of Innovation and Ownership in Living Matter. The book is a history of innovations in living organisms and their parts (e.g., plants, animals, microorganisms, and human genes), and of efforts to protect the intellectual property that they embody; it spans from the late eighteenth century to the present. The innovations include breeding practices and the acquisition and introduction into the market of new types of animals and plants from imports as well as, in the case of fruit trees and vines, chance finds in the fields. It also includes new plant varieties devised in agricultural experiment stations and of genetically modified organisms and human genes that have arisen in academic laboratories and have been licensed to biotechnology companies.Vital Properties will be the first book to deal comprehensively with its subject and the first to treat innovation in living organisms in relation not only to the patent protection that has come to cover them but also to the arrangements for intellectual property protection that were devised outside that system in the United States from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. It will constitute a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarly work that seeks to historicize intellectual property for a broad range of technologies and contextualize its development in the evolving political and legal economy from the early modern period to the present. The book will be written for both general and scholarly audiences and will likely be of interest to historians, policymakers, IP lawyers, and analysts of entrepreneurship, agriculture, biomedicine, and globalization. It will be published by a prominent trade publisher, and will thus reach out to a larger public. It will have substantial potential to affect understanding of, and perhaps even policy debates on, the relation of intellectual property to innovation and entrepreneurship in a competitive national and globalizing economy. It will also throw into historical perspective thereby help clarify or at least contextualize contemporary debates over the control of intellectual property in the food and biomedical sectors with regard to equity between countries in the developed North and the developing South; it will also do so with regards to IP-related issues concerning access to the products of high-technology biomedical research such as pharmaceuticals and the tools of genetic diagnosis.Funds for this project were provided by a joint venture of the BIO and SBE directorates known as "Impacts of Biology on Society," which is administered via the STS program.