Final Report Summary - BIOPROPERTY (Biomedical Research and the Future of Property Rights)
BioProperty has researched the ownership structures of the contemporary life sciences. Through a series of case studies, the project has investigated how property rights emerge in the course of scientific work, how they are contested and eventually stabilised, and how different property regimes shape the productivity of biomedical research. The project has pursued research in the following areas: malaria drug discovery; multidrug-resistant tuberculosis drug development; human-animal chimeras; genetically modified insects; avian flu research and management; human stem cells; biosecurity protocols. In these areas the project has explored novel proprietary models, including 'open source' and 'pre-competitive' approaches to the organization of biomedical research collaborations. The project has drawn attention to the informal, often tacit mechanisms that define the patterns of exchange in collaboration in the contemporary life sciences, and to the role of free-access infrastructures in sustaining collective biomedical research efforts over the necessarily long term. BioProperty has combined work in science and technology studies, economic sociology, medical anthropology, and legal jurisprudence, and has sought to reconceptualize the ontological properties of bioscientific objects as they pertain to their appropriability.