Blog Posts

Bioscientists, plant breeders, and farmers, we WANT you!

20/11/2014

Next month we will be making exciting announcements about our upcoming (2015) international workshop on Intellectual Property (IP), bioscience, and agriculture. HOWEVER, we want to make sure we produce a programme of papers that are attractive not only to lawyers, historians, and so on, but also people out there in the world of science/business who work in an agricultural IP environment on a daily basis.

Rather than just guess at what such people might be interested in/concerned about/wanting to learn more about, we thought it best to send this (an informal 'open letter') to try and get some feedback.

Absolutely anyone can contribute (either in the comments below or via email - the latter is clickable from the icon at the top of the website) but we particularly want to hear from scientists (working in any area of the biosciences), plant breeders, and arable farmers.

We also appreciate that everyone is very busy indeed, but even just spending a few minutes to share your perspective would be immensely valuable and helpful.

Potential things you might want to consider:

Do you feel you get much of an opportunity to define how IP protections should work, and have you ever been frustrated in your efforts, either from lacking this opportunity, or having the opportunity but failing to achieve change?
Are there ways in which IP influences your research choices, for good or ill?
Are there ways in which IP influences your breeding plans, for good or ill?
Are there ways in which IP influences your varietal, or seed management choices, for good or ill?
Are there parts of IP and how it works that you feel you don't understand?
Are there parts of IP and how it works that you don't think OTHER people understand or even know about, but should?
What do you consider to be the most important changes in the IP landscape (nationally and internationally) in recent years?
Are there claims that get regularly made about IP that you consider bonkers or misguided?
Anything else!!?

Email exchanges will of course be kept entirely confidential.

Thank you, from the Cultivating Innovation team.

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Environment(s) in Public workshop; or, how we own parts of the world and our knowledge of them

4/11/2014

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There are three ways that I could have started this blog post. The simplest is to say that yesterday I attended a workshop organised jointly by the 3S (Science, Society, Sustainability) research group, based at the University of East Anglia, and the Broads Authority. A one day affair, ‘Environment(s) in Public?’ drew together researchers under the broad umbrella of environmental history, though to the credit of the organisers (particularly Angela Cassidy), it attracted an interdisciplinary crowd, ranging from historians of medicine, to museum curators, to historical geographers, and even a glimpse of one of those rare birds, a journalist! You can download the programme here should you wish to get in touch with any of the speakers.

Another way in which I could have introduced this post, is by explaining why Cultivating Innovation - a project devoted to elucidating the relations between science, agriculture, and intellectual property (IP) - went to a workshop on environmental history. Those of you with active imaginations and a strong sense of self, probably already grasp the general motivations; agriculture takes place within (or is constitutive of) the environment (or environments- I’ll explain more on that distinction shortly); environmental sciences are of fundamental importance to food security; parts of the environment are already recognised as property (some intellectual, some material); Cultivating Innovation’s never-ending quest is to find as many ways as possible to bring the views of the historian and philosopher of science on IP to as wide an audience as possible, and a great deal in this direction can be achieved by piggybacking on extant communities, communities who may not realise that sensitivity to IP can do some productive work for them. To put the last point more succinctly, there is stuff that IP can do for people who research the environment, though this will require a reinterpretation of certain themes and some adjustment of analytic focus. This is what I will be attempting to achieve in the remainder of this post, and a subsequent one. There is however a third and final way that I could have introduced it.

I am a species of historian who wants to see greater interdisciplinary work take place between the history and philosophy of science (HPS), and environmental history (or the environmental humanities more generally). I am not claiming this perspective to be a great novelty. Most people who address biosciences in the field, whether these be jungles or farms, read widely, and are eclectic about the kinds of work they draw upon. The only reason I write it here, is because it doesn’t exist formally (as far as I know) on the internet as a ‘thing people are trying to do’. Science and Technology Studies, a closely allied discipline to HPS, has made some real headway (see New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies), but things seem - again, as far as I have seen - a little quieter from the overtly HPS end of things. So there, it’s now in black and white, and if you’re the kind of pervert who likes studying plants and animals through various different lenses (particularly HPS and envhist) then you can now proudly look your friends in the eye and tell them it’s a thing, because it’s on the internet, the last bastion of intellectual rigour and decency.

Discussion panel at end of Environment(s) in Public, featuring Andrea Kelly (Senior Ecologist, Broads Authority); John Packman (Chief Executive, Broads Authority); Patrick Barkham (The Guardian); Sophia Collins (science communicator); Helen Pallett (3S research group, UEA).

I’m rapidly running out of words (we stick to 1000 per post to keep our readership MASSIVE), so all I will do here is first explain ‘environment(s)’ and then hint at two general ways IP could be brought to bear on the subject. In a subsequent post (which I promise to write vvvvv soon you coiled potatoes), I’ll address a few of the particular papers presented at the workshop from the Cultivating Innovation perspective, with the intention of providing some more generalizable points on IP and envhist.

Angela Cassidy introduced the workshop by explaining its title, and that bracketed ‘s’. She has already summarised the reasons behind the latter in a post on the 3S website, which you can read here. I have different purposes, so I am going to unpack ‘environment(s)’ slightly differently. The main point, and which Cassidy emphasises, is that talking of ‘THE environment’ (a daily occurrence on the news and in the pub/playground) is about as helpful as talking about THE food, or THE music. It is a category of thing that is fundamentally shifting and various. Before some of you punch me in the face for being banal, yes, yes, when people simplify things by talking of ‘the environment’ they typically have some specific aspects in mind. But that’s not OK. Sometimes they mean weather systems that circulate the globe, sometimes they mean biodiversity and population changes spanning countries, or merely regions. Sometimes they mean environments of which people are a part, sometimes environments from which people are deliberately excluded, and sometimes environments inhospitable to humans. In short, if we’re going to be simplistic, let’s take the time to stick an s on environment. Things might look largely the same, but at least our language automatically captures things better, and - as more than one speaker yesterday pointed out - it also automatically engages more people in the discussion. You might not care about climate change in THE environment, but you just might care about your favourite golf resort flooding every year, or your pheasant hunting being ruined by birds vomiting up chemicals (to rely on some grossly unfair stereotypes).

The distinction also matters for IP. People sometimes speak of a global IP environment, or the IP landscape in any given country. Pluralising our understanding of environment helps to embed IP into those environments we more readily recognise and care about. I’m not worried about the metaphor (except when it is used to suggest there is something unchangeable or natural about the laws and regulations that make up these IP environments), in fact I would like to make the metaphor go further. Firstly, parts of certain environments are IP and owned. In agricultural environments this will obviously be the plant varieties grown by farmers, but what of other environments? Orchards, gardens, parks, these can all be overflowing with plants either protected by IP law, or plants that were once the intellectual property of an individual grower (the circulation of which was restricted and managed accordingly), but have since lost the association with this individual or firm. Nevertheless, these plants are a legacy of certain IP claims, produced in certain cultures of ownership and innovation, and it is therefore worth recovering how they have influenced the environments that we live with today. Secondly, and returning to the more global perspective, the ‘water-energy-food nexus’ is an inherently environmental problem, drawing on finite natural resources that make their maintenance more or less difficult, and therefore the products more or less valuable. It is important to remember that IP is constitutive of these integrated problems, not just an influence ON these environments, but part of them. Perhaps a certain scientist or engineer makes a productivity claim for their equipment or idea (their IP), which, let’s say, addresses the problem of irrigation. This hypothetical product saves water but uses greater amounts of energy. Whether or not the scientist/engineer in question pursues IP-Narrow claims (patents etc.) on this IP, or pursues IP-Broad claims (trying to get their name associated with the innovation, or any number of other ways in which this property might be made theirs), or pursues no claims over this IP, will have direct implications for whether or not this innovation is adopted, where it might be considered suitable to adopt it, and - ultimately - the kinds of environments that we produce and live in.

In the next post I will try and make some more specific links between the papers presented at Environment(s) in Public, and the work in HPS on IP. If you have any suggestions for further ways in which these things might be linked, (or more generally, projects currently explicitly linking HPS research with envhist) please do write to us in the comments section, or send a tweet/email.

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Report from 'Biopatents. Seeds as commodity and as a public good' (Munich)

20/10/2014

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This week we are very pleased to host a guest report from one of our Academic Advisors, Dr Viola Prifti, on a conference she recently attended that addressed IP and the biosciences. Our thanks to Viola!

Cultivating Innovation aims at increasing public awareness of the role of intellectual property in science with a special focus on plant science and farming. This aim intersects with those of similar initiatives supported by other universities. One of these initiatives is the seminar “Biopatents. Seeds as commodity and as a public good” organized by the Institute Technology – Theology – Natural Sciences of the University of Munich. Between Sep. 29 – Oct. 2, academics, researchers, and business representatives met near Weilheim in Oberbayern (Southern Bavaria) to discuss legal, ethical, and social aspects of patents in agriculture. Insulated in the midst of the beautiful Bavarian forest, experts from different disciplines could focus on presenting and debating controversial aspects of biopatents for today’s agriculture system. Industry representatives and biologists illustrated intellectual property issues in protecting innovations in a business firm and university context. Lawyers explained some of the challenges that new plant breeding techniques pose to biopatentability and questioned the role of patents in stimulating plant breeding activities as well as biodiversity conservation within the current legal framework in Europe. The role of biopatents on research, biodiversity conservation, and economic development was further questioned by philosophers, sociologists, and agricultural economists who addressed some negative effects of patents for farming and the need to find an alternative to the patent system for incentivizing agricultural innovation.

These discussions showed that there is a need to integrate legal, ethical, and social considerations in the general discourse on the patentability of biological material. Integration requires an understanding of all of these social sciences in order to offer a solution that could be expressed in common terms by all parties. What is interesting to note in this regard is that similar concerns were raised by experts of different disciplines but the definition of the questions and the solutions offered varied according to the scientific discipline. There was, however, common agreement that a multifaceted issue such as biopatents for agriculture requires an answer that takes account of different interests involved. In this regard, the suggestion of Dr. Andreas Popp – Vice President of the Global Intellectual Property division of BASF – appears quite realistic. Dr. Popp advocated in favor of an agricultural system that accommodates both the patent system and traditional farming as incentives for innovation and biodiversity conservation. The debate is, however, still open. The organizers of the seminar “Biopatents. Seeds as commodity and as public good” welcome you in a public event on March 2-3 in Tutzing to further the debate (in German).

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Making the history and philosophy of science work for YOU! - Our visit to the Organic Research Centre

10/10/2014

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We are trying to find as many collaborators as possible to discuss their views on intellectual property and its relations with their (biological) science. At present we are struggling to find strong partners from within private industry - I wonder to what extent this is a common problem for humanities researchers attempting to engage deeply with those in the sciences? Nevertheless, our primary collaboration with the Organic Research Centre (ORC) is developing exceptionally well. In a large part this is thanks to some very recent innovations in their breeding activity, and the legislation surrounding the same. I went down to Newbury to visit the ORC at their headquarters in order to participate in their monthly staff workshop, and had the opportunity to explain (A) how historians have interpreted the development of the plant breeding industry and its relations with genetics, (B) what intellectual property models the industry has been based on in the past, and (C) what potential lessons this all has for the (and their) future.

Image courtesy of the Organic Research Centre.

The ORC is currently in the process of marketing its first varieties, varieties that it has only been legal to sell since March of this year. Prior to this time, they could not enter the varietal register (a requirement for any marketed variety) on the grounds that they were not sufficiently Distinct, Uniform, and Stable. This new legislation is an important development, because it recognises that there are a number of different ways to be a ‘variety’, and it places this recognition directly into the same apparatus that currently manages the industry (rather than creating special measures). While the legislation that makes legal the sale of these varieties is only put in place on a trial basis, there is no obvious reason why it will not be made permanent. Even in some nightmare scenario, where the marketed variety failed everywhere it was grown, this would not prove that populations or highly variable varieties were not suitable for inclusion on the agricultural market, just as when the more ubiquitous pure line varieties fail nobody claims PBRs should be abolished. Rather, what makes these legislative changes particularly positive, and likely to be long lasting, is that they prove the principle that heterogeneous stocks of seed can be bred, multiplied, marketed, and circulated, just as any other varieties can, provided sufficiently sophisticated language and systems for tracking are put in place. It is - in short - a good thing. AND it promotes competition, so there.

I split my talk into two sections, giving two very concrete examples of how the history and philosophy of science can directly inform contemporary practice. Both points can also be generalised, not only for 'HPS, plant breeders and intellectual property', but for 'HPS, industrial/charitable/national partner and important issue X'.

In the first half of the talk, I focussed on how HPS can uncover the various different forces that produced the contemporary IP landscape in which we all live. I focussed on the origins of the most crucial development in C20th UK plant breeding, Plant Breeders’ Rights. By unpacking the various different social and scientific changes that together helped make PBR’s desirable, then possible, and finally actual, historians of science can open up the contemporary discussion, one that staff at the ORC are already heavily embedded in. Much can be accomplished by simply pointing to a time before PBRs existed, which is not to say we necessarily wish to return to such a time, merely that we can thereby better understand how they came about, and avoid any assumptions or biases that we would no longer wish to carry with us. The bias I focussed on was that of the need for purity in varieties, which seems to have come of age in the interwar years and flourished following the Second World War.

In the second half of the talk, I explained how HPS theories and analysis can help plan for the future. The focus was of course on Professor Gregory Radick’s IP-narrow and IP-broad framework. When debating and discussing the kinds of heterogenous varieties that the ORC is currently breeding (along with a growing number of researchers who see these varieties’ greater adaptability to the environment as an essential characteristic in the face of climate change) some proponents and opponents will sometimes cast the debate as one either for or against IP. This is an unhelpful simplification, one which largely serves to discredit those wishing critique IP law as it currently stands. By embracing the language of IP-narrow/IP-broad, more voices can be brought to the debating table, and a richer notion of intellectual property used in formulating future economic development policies. Over the next few months I will be working with as many actors within plant breeding as possible, to find more and more concrete uses to which IP-narrow/IP-broad might be put.

Just to finish, I would like to let you know that we will soon be hosting a guest post written by one of our collaborators, Dr Viola Prifti, on a conference she recently attended on IP and the biosciences. Things are heating up, so make sure to follow us on twitter, and stick this blog in your RSS readers. Also, don’t be shy about suggesting events for us to attend, or things for us to read.

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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?

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.

Project update and part 2 of our ongoing exploration of the BBC's #histsci programme 'Plants: From Roots to Riches'

12/8/2014

Hello all! Before getting to Plants: From Roots to Riches, we're going to give you a quick project update. For the first few weeks we've been focussing on getting the word out, and putting plans for the international workshop in motion. It’s proving difficult to attract public policy bods and contemporary biologists, or - if they are here - they aren't saying hello! Say hello! The new plan is to get on with actually doing things - writing posts responding to recent issues while making our perspective as clear and provocative as possible. In addition, at some point in the next few weeks we will be asking you all to suggest potential speakers for the workshop, which has been provisionally dated for April 2015 so as to avoid prime plant season. Once we have a nice catalogue of your perspectives and interests, we can start finding ways to bring Radick’s IP-narrow/IP-broad perspective to bear upon them. That’s the plan!

Plants: From Roots to Riches episodes 2-16: I trust you’ve all been listening!

It’s turning out to be an increasingly interesting series. Motivations for the scientific work discussed in each episode have revolved around collection, organisation, and the improvement of the world. These are topics that can be further illuminated by some of the most recent and ground breaking work in the history and philosophy of science. Those of you who are enjoying the series might want to try John Pickstone’s Ways of Knowing, which is always a rewarding read, and draws together the above themes in an exciting and very ambitious way. On this blog we will be focussing on the ways in which agriculture has featured so far in the programme, which is often (whoop!) but not always necessarily very nuanced (boo!) The really important thing however, is that you are all being drawn into these issues through history and biology in tandem. This is a cornerstone of the Cultivating Innovation mission, so BBC, Kathy Willis, and Jim Endersby, we salute you!

Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) - All rights reserved by the Royal Society, which - by the way - has just made this picture, and thousands of others in its digital library, available for purchase as rather classy looking prints. Click on the portrait for more!

“...certainly part of the Linnean project that appeals to Banks is this idea of improvement. Linnaeus wanted to bring rare and unusual plants to Sweden, acclimatize them, reduce Sweden’s dependence on imports. Banks has a similar kind of vision, and its a vision really of improving the world. Improvement is an extraordinarily powerful and important idea in Britain particularly at this time, and it really goes to the notion of common land. A lot of land in Britain at this period is still commonly owned, and anyone can use it, you can take your goose or your goat down to the common and graze it. The worry that people like Banks have is that nobody owns the commons, nobody looks after them, nobody improves them, nobody’s going to manure them, drain them, ditch them and hedge them and so on, and this fear of worthless waste ground and an inability to feed a rising population, encourages Banks and people like him to put enclosure acts through parliament, which enclose common land and make it into private land so that somebody will look after it. So this is very much how Banks sees the world, as a series of waste grounds, common lands, waiting to be enclosed, waiting to be improved.”

- Jim Endersby, episode ‘Plants to Shape Society’, first broadcast 22/7/2014

There is a great deal here worth unpacking, though this post is purely dedicated to the most important point to make (one which was no doubt in Endersby’s mind during the interview), which is - there are plenty of people around the world who think more or less just like this.

Within the group of people classed 'scientist', there are perhaps fewer who think like this who actually work in those sciences directly engaged with agricultural development, disciplines that have attracted a good deal of scrutiny from researchers outside of those sciences, many voicing considerable concern (to put it mildly) with the results of such development programmes. Bringing our biology and history together; the enclosure acts were not just ‘the most sensible thing to do’, they were definitive political actions, with social and economic consequences hotly debated to this day. We cannot simply hold up Banks as a visionary reformer (which was by no means the point of the Roots to Riches programme, though neither did it make these subsequent cautionary points), without knowing the assumptions his ideas were based upon (so that we might assess them), and without knowing the history of their consequences (so that we might assess them). Sabine Clarke is an historian currently taking the history of development programmes, and the histories of the disciplines that pursue them, very seriously indeed, most recently in a project on cane sugar production soon to be released as a book. More specifically on the plant breeding side of things, of particular inspiration for Cultivating Innovation has been Jonathan Harwood’s Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since: The Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant Breeding. Using the case study of Germany in the nineteenth century, Harwood draws out the ways in which different kinds of plant breeding system are more or less encouraging to different kinds of industrial system, and thus to different kinds of farming (some requiring much wealth, some requiring very little). To make the point very simply: scientists and politicians have had designs on nature for a very long time indeed. Before setting out to continue this work, even if we believe that enough consideration is now given to the needs of indigenous populations, it’s probably still worth having a look at that history (even if all you're doing is following a hyperlink on a dinky little blog post.)

That’s all we can manage this time around! Stay tuned for more as the BBC programme continues. For instance, we have something to say about Vavilov, but it will have to wait, and so shall you. Don’t forget to get in touch if you have suggestions, advice, or questions for us.

The BBC's new #histsci programme 'Plants: From Roots to Riches' - the view from Cultivating Innovation

28/7/2014

Hello all, and as we end week 1 of the Cultivating Innovation project, I am very happy to report that we have had over 1000 hits on the website! (1205 to be precise).

It is appropriate that for the first proper post of this project, we get to discuss a new BBC programme that not only refers to the economic significance of biological science, but also makes a pretty big intellectual property claim over history. I am referring to the series Plants: from Roots to Riches which began last week and consists of 25 episodes, each 15 minutes in length.* It is presented by Professor Kathy Willis, Director of Science at Kew Gardens.

Looking over the upcoming episodes, and listening to the first, it does appear that the economic ‘Riches’ element will feature, perhaps most acutely in the programme ‘Tapping into Rubber’. As for the intellectual property claim on history, well - in what remains an unhappy pattern - this history of science programme is once again presented by someone who is a scientist rather than an historian. Some of you might have heard historians banging on about this sort of thing a little too often, crying into their pints and thumping the table, “It’s not right damn it! It’s not right!!!” Nevertheless, it really is annoying! Imagine you wanted to know the history of a piece of art. Would you ask the artist about it? Of course! But you wouldn’t stop there. You’d want to ask their friends and family, then you’d want to consider potential influences, compare and contrast with artwork from the same period and different periods, consider the methods/materials used and their history i.e. you’d have to approach the question like an historian. The artist isn’t going to be in a position to tell you very much about the history of the thing, or what it means in the history of art, because they’ve trained as an artist, not an historian! Fortunately, I am very happy to report that Dr Jim Endersby, historian of biology and author of one of my top three books on the subject ‘A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology’, was consulted by the programme makers - though I have no idea how much input he actually had. There’s plenty worth listening to, and Endersby does important work bringing the economic motivations behind Linnaeus’ project to the public in a way that has not been achieved before (indeed I've never seen it expressed so plainly and learnt a great deal). I particularly enjoyed Willis’ first interviewee who cheerily explains that he likes the 200+ year old cycad “because its age makes you realise how insignificant people are and their lifespan.” So what then is the Cultivating Innovation view on the programme?

Quite frankly Plants: from Roots to Riches is full to the brim with intellectual property claims, and moreover, claims that can be encompassed within Gregory Radick’s IP-narrow/IP-broad framework (see his publication linked to on the ‘People’ page). This post focuses on the first episode, but other episodes will be considered in the next few days.

First off, consider the Linnean system itself. Linnaeus’ system was only one of a very great many. Taking the intellectual property perspective, we can recognise that ‘Linnaean’ is perhaps the most successful eponym of all time! Even people who don’t know what it is will have heard of the ‘Linnean system’. We do not typically think to include this sort of eponym in our histories of science, but doing so places botany and taxonomy in a new light. The kind of cultural capital invested in the Linnaean system, aside from being something of a reward for intellectual labour, is of massive value to everyone who chooses to embrace and expand that system, including above all Linnaeus himself. Which leads to my second point.

The very problem that Linnaeus ended up solving - overcoming the great many competing taxonomic systems - was caused by intellectual property concerns.** As Endersby explains “That was a source of great confusion. Virtually every Director of a botanic garden, every collector of and student of plants, had their own system of names….it was a botanical tower of Babel”. What was going on here? Well, many different people, each looking to achieve a certain amount of prestige, were keen to ensure that they were rewarded. As there were no clear social mechanisms that could reward them for pooling their intellectual property, they instead did the only sensible thing they could “they would have their own local names, often their own local scholarly system, and they would often be speaking or writing in different languages too.” Endersby’s reference to languages also brings in the importance of the international perspective. At the recent British Society for the History of Science annual conference, hosted this year by the University of St Andrews, I heard a paper from Geof Bil, who is completing a PhD at the University of British Columbia. His paper was ALL ABOUT how the naming of plants is a powerful cultural and political tool, and how the knowledge of very local people (in the countries that Willis refers to as ‘conquered’ in the programme, without tackling the problems this entails!) really mattered to scientists. In Bil’s paper, which focussed on botanists in the UK and the Māori people of New Zealand in the nineteenth century, botanist collectors were heavily dependent upon Māori knowledge and the names they used to distinguish plants. By considering the intellectual property implications of this kind of activity, we once again find new ways to understand the history of botany and what this means for all of us.

Lastly, consider the cycad tree that the programme opens with, and which is used as a focal point throughout. It’s latin name is Encephalartos altensteinii, the latter - it is explained - is in homage to Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, a nineteenth century Prussian politician who was...a patron for science! So here, whoever named this plant, is using Linnaeus’ system to ‘spread the intellectual property wealth’, by sticking someone’s name straight into the taxonomy, and making them synonyms with that same intellectual property. I have not looked into it, but I bet the person who named the Encephalartos altensteinii was German.

Well, that’s enough to be getting on with for now! Please do follow us by using the links at the very top of the site, and get in touch either in the comments or in email to me d.berry[at]leeds.ac.uk

* This post was edited on 9/8/2014, as it had originally said there were only 9 episodes. These were the 9 listed in just July, I had not seen the further programmes that extend in to August. Apologies for the error.

**(It is, by the way, anachronistic to refer to ‘intellectual property’ in the C18th, as it is a term that originates in more modern times. I am nevertheless going to use it throughout the project to keep things simple, save time, and keep us all on message. Perhaps I should write a special post explaining all the complexities of the word and then link to that post whenever I write ‘intellectual property’....yes...that’s a good idea).

Welcome to Cultivating Innovation!

18/7/2014

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.

Forward>>

Bioscientists, plant breeders, and farmers, we WANT you!

Environment(s) in Public workshop; or, how we own parts of the world and our knowledge of them

Report from 'Biopatents. Seeds as commodity and as a public good' (Munich)

Making the history and philosophy of science work for YOU! - Our visit to the Organic Research Centre

What can patenting in agriculture learn from patenting in medicine?

Project update and part 2 of our ongoing exploration of the BBC's #histsci programme 'Plants: From Roots to Riches'

The BBC's new #histsci programme 'Plants: From Roots to Riches' - the view from Cultivating Innovation

Welcome to Cultivating Innovation!

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