A01=Shobita Parthasarathy
agriculture
animals
Author_Shobita Parthasarathy
bioethics
biology
biotechnology
capitalism
Category=N
commodification
cure
democracy
development
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
ethics
europe
experiment
genes
healthcare
innovation
law
legal system
medicine
nonfiction
ownership
patents
patient outcomes
plants
poverty
public health
research
science
stem cells
treatment
wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226437859
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 21 Feb 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Over the past thirty years, the world's patent systems have experienced civil society pressure like never before. From farmers to patient advocates, new voices are arguing that patents impact public health, economic inequality, morality even democracy. These challenges, to domains that we usually consider technical and legal, seem odd. But in Patent Politics, Shobita Parthasarathy argues that patent systems have always been deeply political and social. To demonstrate this, Parthasarathy takes readers through a particularly fierce and prolonged set of controversies over patents on life forms linked to important advances in biology and agriculture as well as potentially life-saving medicines. Contrasting battles over patents on animals, human embryonic stem cells, human genes, and plants in the United States and Europe, she shows how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent system politics. Clashes over whose voices and what values matter in the patent system, as well as what counts as knowledge and whose expertise is important, look quite different in these two places.
And through these debates, the United States and Europe are developing very different approaches to patent and innovation governance. Not just the first comprehensive look at the controversies swirling around biotechnology patents, Patent Politics is also the first in-depth analysis of the political underpinnings and implications of modern patent systems, and provides a timely analysis of how we can reform these systems around the world to maximize the public interest.
Shobita Parthasarathy is associate professor of public policy and women's studies at the University of Michigan.
