tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post3190923156736690274..comments2023-11-03T08:02:25.369-04:00Comments on AmericanScience: A Team Blog: The Ontology of Patent Law, Part IDavid Roth Singermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12841041983824755867noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-3542829121341863022013-12-23T05:03:30.793-05:002013-12-23T05:03:30.793-05:00Metadata Manager is a Ontology Repository web-base...Metadata Manager is a <a href="http://www.adaptive.com/company/who-we-are/" rel="nofollow"><b>Ontology Repository</b></a> web-based repository that offers enhanced capabilities in the areas of data governance, regulatory compliance and metadata management.<br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14156927881909676131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-21496807670376796492013-09-12T04:15:17.801-04:002013-09-12T04:15:17.801-04:00we saw the need for a web-based solution that was ...we saw the need for a web-based solution that was capable of integrating the multiple business and technical tools currently in use by financial organizations. That is why we decided to work exclusively with Adaptive who is helping us migrate our Semantics Repository to their standards-based Metadata Manager. <br />Financial Ontologyhttp://www.adaptive.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-68472004550527844302013-03-08T08:30:19.248-05:002013-03-08T08:30:19.248-05:00Lukas,
Great post - having read a number articles...Lukas,<br /><br />Great post - having read a number articles that stubbornly stuck to the legal minutia of this case, I'm really glad to see someone do something more broad and interesting with it.<br /><br />I'll hold most of my thoughts for Part II, but briefly:<br /><br />First, Diamond v. Chakrabarty seems to me to have done a lot to generate the sharp historical line that's come to separate "biotechnology" from "other stuff" (cultivation of microorgamisms for brewing, Loeb-style tropisms, breeding, other agricultural technologies like that of the Funk Brothers). Usually, as you note, that line is construed in terms of ontological order: agriculture, say, involves shuffling around nature's units, while biotechnology involves manipulations inside those units.<br /><br />Now, historians (Robert Bud comes to mind) have written the latter back into the story of the former. However, the science-venture capital nexus that characterizes biotechnology is of a different order, institutionally and economically if not (necessarily) intellectually and technologically. And patents have been the glue in that science-VC bond. So it seems like there's a really fascinating entanglement here of financial and institutional ontology, on the one hand, and biological ontology, on the other.<br /><br />Second, it seems to me that even more than the discovery/invention binary, patent law relies on and instantiates a distinction between principle and application (going back to the demonstration requirement of early modern privileges, as Biagioli has pointed out). I'd be curious to hear your take on how these two heuristics used to demarcate science and engineering/technology relate to each other.Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18194354174479536249noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-68156762365187380112013-03-07T04:05:35.647-05:002013-03-07T04:05:35.647-05:00Too long, indeed. Unfortunately, I will not be in ...Too long, indeed. Unfortunately, I will not be in Montpellier. At least I didn't submit anything.<br /><br />Thanks for the offer, but I don't think that I am able to write a whole post on it, as it's only a vague deduction. But given that applicability has always been an integral part of the history of the molecular life sciences with an ever closer association between academic and commercial research, I would just expect, that the ways in which the products of research are judged in the legal realm feed back into how researchers think about their objects. Susan Wright has argued in a similar way, showing the transformation of norms and practices in the context of commerical application of molecular biology in her 1986 paper "Recombinant DNA Technology and its Social Transformation, 1972-1982" (there is surely more recent stuff). If you then consider Rheinberger's argument that especially in molecular biology it is not possible to separate practices, theoretical knowledge and objects/things, this must then also affect the scientists' ontology (besides the question, whether it is at all possible to separate epistemology and ontology in Rheinberger's approach). With ontology, I refer to Ursula Klein's and Wolfgang Lefèvre's concept of 'historical ontology' in "Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science. A Historical Ontology". Legal decisions must have far-reaching consequences in terms of funding. Patentable and thus artifical objects/methods will be favored over natural ones. At the same time, researchers themselves will look for what can be shown to be artifical and thus patentable.<br />But as I said, this is neither based on empirical material nor am I able to provide examples from biopatenting. I am still lingering around in 19th century zoology.Christian Reissnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-5177980013919026432013-03-06T10:01:17.849-05:002013-03-06T10:01:17.849-05:00Good to hear from you Christian. It's been to...Good to hear from you Christian. It's been too long! (Will you be at ISH in Montpellier this summer?) <br /><br />You are exactly right that patent law forces lawyers and judges to make decisions of BOTH and ontological AND epistemological nature. For example, the myriad genetics case that is currently before the Supreme Court hinges, in part, on the notion that isolated sequences of genomic DNA (e.g. BRCA 1/2 genes cut out from the rest of the genome) are not a product of nature. But as Eric Lander (head of the Broad Institute at Harvard & MIT) points out in a friend of the court brief, most biologists agree that this is factually inaccurate. DNA molecules are broken up all the time. For example, the enzyme DNase cleaves DNA molecules at non-specific sites (i.e. at random intervals), cutting it up into smaller pieces after a cell dies. The laws of probability being what they are, it is all but certain that the specific regions of DNA protected by the BRCA 1/2 patent routinely occur in an isolated state in the human body.<br /><br />I'll have more to say about this in my next post, but for now, let me just say this: the main argument I am trying to make is that questions about whether something is or is not a product of nature often and interestingly end up turning on what you take that thing to be. If we take it for granted that nature works at the level of individual organisms and species of organisms (i.e. that individuals and species are the units of evolution) then the argument that Chakrabarty's patent is for and invention whereas the patent under dispute in Funk Brothers is a discovery makes intuitive sense. But if we engage in an epistemic shift and say that evolution works at the level of DNA molecules too then the two start to look a lot more similar. <br /><br />I'd be curious to hear more about how you see the ontology of the patent law feeding back into both the ontology & epistemology of the life sciences. Could you be roped into writing guest post?Lukashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05686764806913124506noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-55218809956953765112013-03-06T03:49:57.215-05:002013-03-06T03:49:57.215-05:00Great post, Lukas. I just recently had a conversat...Great post, Lukas. I just recently had a conversation with a lawyer from the German Farmers Association, where we talked a lot about biopatents and the position of the Association. I was particularly struck by the ways in which biological knowledge/facts were translated into the legal realm and that in the end, courts and judges decide about, as you emphasized, ontological questions. While I really like how you link the dichotomy invention/discovery to epistemology/ontology and point to implications and consequences, I am also interested in another aspect of all this. Talking to that lawyer, I tried to figure out, how she, who has no background in the life sciences or even biopatents, approaches this highly technical topic. Or more general, how judges etc. do that. What is their epistemology? The epistemology with which they "wade into the deep waters of ontological deliberation", as you put it. The epistemology which is the basis for their ontological decisions, which in turn, as I would suggest, feed back into the life sciences, altering their ontologies as well.Christian Reissnoreply@blogger.com