DNA patents have been being granted since the 1970s. Patents are meant to act as incentives, encouraging innovation and dissemination in biotechnology by granting inventors exclusive economic control of their inventions for a set period of time. Governments in North America and Europe have therefore been using patents as a public policy tool to encourage the invention of health-related biotechnologies since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. However despite this laudable policy goal, there have also in recent decades been a number (...) of controversies related to patenting in biotechnology. Commentators are concerned that patents may in fact be having a detrimental effect on innovation of and access to health-related products and processes. While empirical evidence that has been collected to date in relation to these concerns remains inconclusive, the debate may be clarified through the articulation of the rights and responsibilities that are at stake. The scope and content of a human right to healthcare are ultimately society-dependent, but its articulation can clarify whether instrumental property rights granted to inventors are interfering with this right in an unacceptable way. Intellectual property rights in health-related biotechnologies cannot be justified from a theoretical perspective, and so more definitive empirical data elucidating the role that patents play in regards to innovation and dissemination of health-related biotechnology is needed. (shrink)

This paper offers a different pragmatic and patent-based approach to concerns regarding the negative effects of genetic-based patenting on advancing scientific research and providing adequate and accessible health care services. At the basis of this approach lies an explication of a mandatory provisional patented paper procedure (PPPA), designed for genetic-based patents and administered by leading scientific journals in the field, while officially acknowledged by the USPTO, and subsequently by other patent offices as well. It is argued that the uniqueness of (...) PPPAs lies in subsequently mitigating the negative ramifications of genetic patents on scientific research and genetic-based health care services, while basing such mitigation on a patents’ advocate viewpoint that neither discards the patent system nor jeopardizes its integrity. (shrink)