Description
Book SynopsisOver 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 wha
