PUBPOL 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Bioprospecting, Civil Society
Document Summary
Efforts to smuggle cheap, generic medicines out of the developing world. International players patenting genes, plants, and related traditional knowledge from the developing world. International players, usually companies but can also be universities, from us or europe go to the developing world and take biological information and bring it back to the developed world and commercialize it. Companies like bayer are making a lot of money from these things and not giving credit or money to anyone from africa. It challenges how we think about who is the innovator and what kind of credit that innovator should get. The assumption is that the knowledge or materials aren"t valuable, but the work that is done in the developed world (turning stuff into a pill, working to get the fda approval) is what is being valued. Making citizens in the developing world into research subjects to test pharmaceuticals.
