International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences: 3 Papers

R&D, economics of science, science funding, EU

The study of socioethical issues in systems biology

Systems biology is the rapidly growing and heavily funded successor science to genomics. Its mission is to integrate extensive bodies of molecular data into a detailed mathematical understanding of all life processes, with an ultimate view to their prediction and control. Despite its high profile and widespread practice, there has so far been almost no bioethical attention paid to systems biology and its potential social consequences. We outline some of systems biology's most important socioethical issues by contrasting the concept of systems as dynamic processes against the common static interpretation of genomes. New issues arise around systems biology's capacities for in silico testing, changing cultural understandings of life, synthetic biology, and commercialization. We advocate an interdisciplinary and interactive approach that integrates social and philosophical analysis and engages closely with the science. Overall, we argue that systems biology socioethics could stimulate new ways of thinking about socioethical studies of life sciences.ESRC; AHR

From Protecting Texts to Protecting Objects in Biotechnology and Software:A Tale of Changes of Ontological Assumptions in Intellectual Property Protection

International audienceBoth software and agricultural inventions have recently become patentable. Previously, software was protected by copyright, while agricultural inventions were protected by plant breeders' rights. Here we argue that legislation on intellectual property is shaped by ontological considerations (i.e. ideas about the object to be protected), and we propose that the introduction of patenting in software and biotechnology marks a change from protecting a text to protecting an object. However, this change rests on outdated assumptions about the relationship between structures and functions in both fields. Such an ontological perspective gives us a deeper understanding of recent transformations in intellectual property regimes