Update: Conference and the Naked Genetics Podcast

Hello dear readers! It's been a little while since we've posted about the project, thanks to the tonne of things we've been up to. The most important is that we held our international and interdisciplinary conference two weeks ago over at the John Innes Centre. We heard from plant breeders, lawyers, development experts, historians, and the plant science folk who made up the audience. We are currently in the process of editing the videos of all the conference papers, including the keynote address given by Daniel Kevles, so we won't provide a summary of them in this post. Here we simply wish to thank all our speakers, not only for sharing their work, but for incorporating IP-narrow/IP-broad language and concepts into their papers where they could. You can read an excellent summary of Kevles talk on Matt Holmes' blog, which it should be noted is a great read on all topics environmental, planty, historical and scientific.

Professor Daniel Kevles (Yale University) giving the keynote address 'From public to private goods: the evolution of plant properties in the American political economy'. 14/4/2015

In addition our Project Researcher, Dominic Berry, has ruined an episode of the Naked Genetics podcast, which is hosted and run by Dr Kat Arney, who we would also like to thank here, not only for helping spread the Cultivating Innovation word but for being generous and supportive as Dominic cheese-grated his mind on a microphone. The episode is dedicated to 'Patenting and Preserving Genes' and also features an interview from Mike Ambrose of the John Innes Centre. Mike alongside the JIC archivist and historian Dr Sarah Wilmot helped to organise our conference, and put together a display of archive material related to the history of intellectual property in UK plant science. Our thanks to they also!

Upcoming on this blog:

• Viola Prifti's thesis summary and her view on the most important issues in IP and bioscience today.
  
• The Fascination of Plants day (we are joining a team of plant scientists from Leeds for this event).
• Conference videos and abstracts.
• Educational materials - they are taking shape and will be available to download before the end of May.

As ever please do get in touch if there is anything you would like to know more about.