The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain

'The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain' addresses one of the most heated policy debates of our day: access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits. Seven scholars ? an anthropologist, an economist, a sociologist, and four lawyers ? discuss how a museum can flesh out the relevant ethical issues that frustrate any purely technical solution. The visitors to the proposed museum become a source of considered judgments. Commercial movies are screened and discussion follows about some aspect of bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain, suggested in the films. Both the screenings and discussions occur in small amphitheatres named according to the uneven chronology in the management of information: 100,00 BC to 16 September 1787 (public domain); 17 September 1787 to today's date (intellectual property); and today's date to (?) (legislation sui generis). The three amphitheatres surround a courtyard café which is a metaphor for the mission of the museum: conversation. The scholars vet the blueprint before an imaginary octogenarian who is not at all impressed and will "say the damnedest things." As this 21st century Don Quixote moseys across the chapters and pokes fun at the scholarly ruminations, the reader begins to understand how the proposed museum is indeed a forum for the nuanced ethics over bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain. The dialogue-within-a-dialogue is highly original and entertaining.

Preface; Acknowledgments; The Bauplan; Looking the Gorgon in the Face: The Ubiquity of Propaganda and the Business of Debate; Museums as Venues for Polemics: Exhibits that Provoke Controversy, Argumentation or Refutation; The Museum as a Vehicle for Considered Judgments on Access and Benefit Sharing; Clearing the Air: Applying the Intellectual Property Framework to National, Community, and Individual Rights in The Convention on Biological Diversity; The Tragedy of the Anti-commons Threat to Farmers' Rights: The Case of Crop Germplasm; The Moral Foundations of Intellectual Property and Conservation through Access and Benefit-Sharing; The Nameless Interloper in The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain: A Place, A Process, A Philosophy; Appendix: The Original Essay