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What can patenting in agriculture learn from patenting in medicine?

26/9/2014

 
There is a substantial and wide variety of expertise on intellectual property theory, policy, and history here at the University of Leeds. Recently, in recognition of these overlapping interests and research problems, a number of scholars have established a new Research Group on Emerging Technologies in Law and Society. As yet, no official announcements have been made, but as soon as these exist I will post the details. Having all these aligned researchers right on your doorstep means you can get out and stretch your scholarly legs from time to time. Over the past couple of days I have been doing precisely this, entering the world of intellectual property in medicine and disability at the last of the 3 workshops organised by our sister project ‘Rethinking Patent Cultures’. Dr Claire Jones, formerly at the University of Leeds and now down at Kings College London, Dr Jamie Stark and Professor Graeme Gooday, organised the two day event, which incorporated papers on everything from nineteenth century artificial ear drums, to literary representations of disability, and the numerous ways in which notions of intellectual property (and the legal protection of novel technologies and techniques), are problematised in the same.  Here’s the real question: What can agriculture learn from medicine?
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Users: Historians and philosophers of technology have a sophisticated understanding of how novel inventions are dependent upon, and interact with, their users (a term that in its lack of specificity is meant to remind us that there are a huge variety of different types.) I had already learnt much about this from Dr Michael Kay, who recently completed his PhD thesis here at Leeds on the early history of the telephone. This sort of technology, and the importance of the telephone in particular for the history of the deaf, was a recurring theme across the two days. A number of speakers reflected on the extent to which the telephone - by requiring a certain level of hearing capacity from its users - helped to actually make the category of ‘the deaf’ all the more concrete, as this new direct and widely diffused measurement of human hearing came to infiltrate society. All this talk of users got me thinking about two questions in agriculture: 

1) who are the users of agricultural technology? The farmers? Food processors? The consumer? The state? It is not very interesting of me to simply highlight that ‘the point’ of agriculture is a highly divisive and controversial question. However, that hist-tech understanding of the ‘user’, the power of which was abundantly demonstrated at Jones et al.’s  conference on medicine and disability, could be productively applied to agriculture, seems worthy of further exploration. A quick google scholar search confirms to me that development studies literature on ‘farmer first’ initiatives are crying out for interpretation from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science. 

2) if we allow that farmers are the key users of agricultural technology, and we can readily recognise the ways in which certain technologies - particularly when approached from the perspective of disability - are conducive of greater social division and exclusion, why are we so hesitant to admit the same in farming? There is an overarching culture of blame placed upon farmers who ‘fail’ to adopt the ‘correct’ techniques and technology. Before agricultural scientists and development programme leaders jump on my throat and say “but we don’t do that anymore!”, yes, there is now a greater sensitivity toward variations in farmer capacity for tech adoption in different parts of the world - but herein lies my question. Some people just do things differently. To hold them to a common standard is surely an odd impulse - unless perhaps we’re talking about a nationalised industry - and one that should at the very least be placed under the microscope. Interest in researching farmer ‘adoption’ of new technology seems to wax and wane - see Ruttan’s ‘What Happened to Technology Adoption-Diffusion Research?’ and again, in the case of agriculture, we seem to be thin on the ground for historians of science and technology. The best I know of is Deborah Fitzgerald’s ‘Every Farm a Factory’, but that’s getting older all the time! (Sub-text here is GIVE DOMINIC RESEARCH MONEY).

Innovation: Another common theme was disability as a catalyst for innovation. Rather than merely the obvious ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, it was much more common for speakers to emphasize the sheer variety of locations in which invention might take place. Jai Virdi’s paper for instance, which traced the history of the artificial ear drum from a prosthesis available to only a few (and requiring the expertise of a surgeon), to a patented and mass-produced device, and finally to a ‘quack’ remedy, demonstrated how novelty can breed novelty but - not necessarily - the kind of novelty that actually matters to a deaf person. An alternative model was found in Laurel Daen’s paper, in the figure of Captain George Webb Derenzy, who was wounded in battle and lost an arm, causing him to set about inventing devices to carry on as independent a life as possible. Working as an individual, and publishing his really remarkable catalogue of devices (including their prices), Derenzy did not however attempt to legally protect his intellectual property through the use of patents. What lessons for agriculture might these two cases hold? Well the first is fairly easy to translate - if left to industry, not all innovations will becoming increasingly valuable to the consumers concerned, though - by nature of their being novel - can still attract a significant market. In plant breeding this problem occurs with some regularity, simply because it can be extremely difficult to prove incontrovertibly that an improvement has been made from one variety to the next AND because where these improvements might actually be exploited - which depends upon particular environmental conditions and supplementary technologies such as fertilizers - is highly context dependent. As for the second case, that of Derenzy, well to what extent does it matter that he had a stake in disability through his own experiences? I’m sure this is by no means a general rule amongst disabled inventors, but what difference does this shared experience/risk make? To translate this to agriculture - once upon a time, most plant breeding firms were also engaged as agriculturalists at-large. What difference does it make that most plant breeding firms no longer share the same environmental experiences, or the same economic risks, as the farming communities that they serve? Moreover, global intellectual property regimes, that seek to homogenize laws and minimum standards of regulation, force further wedges between the farmer and the particular locations in which they work, by treating them all the same. 

I’ve reached my typical 1000 word limit! Bye!

Thanks to Shubha Ghosh, Graeme Gooday, Viola Prifti, Mercedes Campi and Gregory Radick for providing comments and corrections on a draft of this post. Any of its failings are still mine, obvs.

Welcome to Cultivating Innovation!

18/7/2014

 
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Hello and welcome to the Cultivating Innovation project! An overview of the project outline can be read elsewhere on this site. The aim of this first blog post is simply to begin the discussion, and attract people to this site as a lively and informal forum. Please do stick this blog in your RSS readers, sign up to have new posts delivered via email, contribute to each post in the comment boxes below, or if you have an idea for a post that you think might be appropriate to publish here, please email the Project Researcher, Dominic Berry on d.berry[at]leeds.ac.uk

Over the next 12 months we will be discussing the history of innovation in plant sciences (how people made new types of organism, and what this might mean), the history of intellectual property in the plant sciences (how people went about either trying to own their purportedly new products, or indeed refusing to take some form of ownership over them), new models for how to understand these changes (with an emphasis on Greg Radick’s brand spanking new “IP-narrow/IP-broad” theory, which will be explained in as much detail as possible), while also giving the ‘Cultivating Innovation’ view on developments in IP in the plant sciences as they unfold throughout the year.

We really want to attract the attention of people who have to deal with intellectual property issues in the plant sciences on a day-to-day basis. Do you work in a lab/research unit on a university campus, or in a private plant breeding firm? Are you a farmer or someone who works in a commercial seed firm, and so have to deal with issues such as seed certification? Do you work in public policy, and have to consider the environmental results of various types of intellectual property system in agriculture? We want to hear from you! We are already going to be working closely with the Organic Research Centre, and have secured the British Society of Plant Breeders as Project Affiliates (which means they will be taking an interest in the project, offering comments and lending their expertise when they can) and we hope to strengthen these relationships and build upon them as much as possible.* We are hoping to gather more Project Affiliates, so if you represent an organisation (or know of an organisation we could approach) who might be particularly interested in the project then please let us know about them, or send them our details.

While the project gets off the ground in these first few weeks, we would like to point you in the direction or two very important online resources, both of which have informed part of the base of Cultivating Innovation. 

Firstly, the IPBio network, created and maintained by Dr. Berris Charnley, who has kindly agreed to share his expertise as an Academic Advisor to Cultivating Innovation. Here you will find an excellent array of videos and links to lectures by world-class researchers in the history of biology and intellectual property, alongside other resources. Secondly, the ongoing Rethinking Patent Cultures project currently being pursued by fellow researchers here at Leeds. The University of Leeds has a real concentration of expertise in the history and contemporary status of intellectual property around the world. These latter researchers are focussing in particular on the history of IP in medicine, which makes for an excellent comparison point for the history of agriculture, albeit in ways that are perhaps not obvious, but will emerge much more clearly as Cultivating Innovation comes to interact with Rethinking Patent Cultures, a discussion that will be aided by having Graeme Gooday (Principal Investigator on ‘Rethinking’) as our Co-Investigator.

So welcome! Here’s to an exciting 12 months.



*Unfortunately, after further discussions within the BSPB, it was decided that it was not appropriate for this organisation to be so closely involved with the project. The Cultivating Innovation team will therefore be finding new ways in which to interact with industry representatives directly. Any and all suggestions will be very welcome.



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