This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological ‘objects’. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy realm of the natural world. The creation of ‘objects’ also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are (...) better understood as ontologically fluid, which is to say their identity cannot be ‘fixed’ — or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today’s biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms. (shrink)

Phenologists track the seasonal behavior of plants and animals in response to climatic change. During the second half of the twentieth century, phenologists developed a large-scale project to monitor the flowering time of the common lilac across the United States. By the 1960s, this approach offered a potential plant-based indicator of anthropogenic climate change, a biological signal amidst the emerging narrative of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As a tangible representation of changes in climate—warmer temperatures lead to earlier blooming—phenology (...) proved highly legible to scientists, politicians, and laypeople. Yet, as phenology gained broader repute in the 1960s, both in agricultural stations and as a component program of the International Biological Program, it struggled to align itself epistemically with the regnant disciplinary assumptions of mid-century ecology. Operating in the hinterlands between laboratory and field, biology and meteorology, ecological theory and agronomy practice, phenologists challenged prevailing notions of the model organism and what it meant to study biology in the field. Rebranding the discipline as a component of ecosystem modeling, scientists successfully brought phenology within the purview of mainstream ecology. In so doing, however, they obscured its climate-relevant meteorological character and stymied the development of a biological narrative of climate change. (shrink)

Advocates of “Mendelism” early on stressed the usefulness of Mendelian principles for breeders. Ever since, that usefulness—and the favourable opinion of Mendelism it supposedly engendered among breeders—has featured in explanations of the rapid rise of Mendelian genetics. An important counter-tradition of commentary, however, has emphasized the ways in which early Mendelian theory in fact fell short of breeders’ needs. Attention to intellectual property, narrowly and broadly construed, makes possible an approach that takes both the tradition and the counter-tradition seriously, by (...) enabling a more complete description of the theory-reality shortfall and a better understanding of how changing practices, on and off the Mendelians’ experimental farms, functioned to render that shortfall unproblematic. In the case of plant breeding in Britain, a perennial source of lost profits and disputes over ownership was the appearance of individual plants departing from their varietal types—so-called “rogues.” Mendelian plant varieties acquired a reputation for being rogue-free, and so for demonstrating the correctness of Mendelian principles , at a time when Mendelians were gradually taking control of the means for distributing their varieties. Mendelian breeders protected their products physically from rogue-inducing contamination in such a way that when rogues did appear, the default explanation—that contamination had somehow occurred—ensured that there was no threat to Mendelian principles. (shrink)

This article examines crop varietal standardization in the United States. Numerous committees formed in the early twentieth century to address the problem of nomenclatural rules in the horticultural and agricultural industries. Making shared reference to a varietal name proved a difficult proposition for seed-borne crops because plant conformity tended to change in the hands of different breeders. Moreover, scientific and commercial opinions diverged on the value of deviations within crop varieties. I review the function of descriptive difference in the seed (...) trade and in the framework of evolutionary theory before examining the institutional history of varietal standardization. Pimento peppers are used to represent how vegetables were treated differently than cereals. Lack of stability within a popular pimento variety caused problems for food packers in middle Georgia, which public breeders addressed by releasing new peppers. To conclude, the article questions the role of taxonomy in intellectual property, as breeding history and yield became defining attributes for making varietal distinctions. (shrink)