1 2 Maurice Cassier is a sociologist at the CNRS in Paris, working in the Medicine, Science, Health and Society Research Centre. His work is on relations between universities and industry, the integration of science, medicine, and the market in the field of genomics, and the confron- tation between intellectual property and public health, both today and in the nine- teenth century. E-mail: cassierext.jussieu.fr 17 18 19 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 22 23 24 44 Private property, collective property, and public property in the age of genomics 45 49 Maurice Cassier 50 51 52 Introduction 53 In his work The Biotech Century: Harnessing 54 the Gene and Remaking the World, Rifkin 55 (1998) draws a parallel between the present- 56 day extension of intellectual property rights in 57 genetic resources and the seventeenth-century 58 Enclosure Acts in England, which privatised 59 formerly common or collectively owned 60 property. 1 This trend of privatisation is bound 61 62 up with an unprecedented 63 degree of integration 64 between science and the 65 market. 2 In the first place, a 66 private sector and a market 67 in genome research were 68 formed during the 1990s, 69 with the setting up of 70 research corporations sup- 71 ported directly by the fin- 72 ancial markets. Secondly, 73 public research bodies and 74 academic institutions inten- 75 sified the commercialisation 76 of their work, encouraged 77 by legislation aimed at mak- 78 79 ing it easier to turn knowledge that had been 80 produced with public funds into negotiable priv- 81 ate property. This new integration of research 82 and market led to massive patenting of genetic 83 sequences, a proliferation of databases protected 84 by commercial confidentiality, the signing of 85 contracts for exclusive access to the genetic 86 and medical data of certain populations, and an 87 increasing tendency for research agreements or 88 arrangements for transfer of materials to contain 89 clauses restricting use. The “commons model” 1 2 ISSJ 171/2002  UNESCO 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1 ISSJ: international social science journal 2 29-11-01 14:50:22 Rev 16.03x NWISSJ368P 3 90 (Heller and Eisenberg 1998), based on free 91 access to genome resources and knowledge and 92 wide dissemination of them, has lost so much 93 ground to the “private ownership model” that 94 a “Tragedy of the Anticommons” (Heller and 95 Eisenberg, op. cit.) could ensue, where in the 96 case of the human genome “too many owners 97 have the right to exclude others from using a 98 scarce resource, and the resource is prone to 99 under-use” because it becomes too costly for 100 101 innovators to gather and pay 102 for the manifold licences 103 needed before medical inno- 104 vations can be developed. 105 This trend towards 106 privatisation of research, 107 although very strong in the 108 field of human genomics, is, 109 however, neither one-way, 110 nor entirely settled; on the 111 contrary, there is a tradition 112 of collective research in the 113 field of genetics, especially 114 where gene mapping is con- 115 cerned. As early as the 116 1930s, the American geneti- 117 118 cist T. H. Morgan put together a network of 119 laboratories which cooperated in mapping the 120 genes of Drosophila. In this network of some 121 half-dozen laboratories, the newly identified 122 Drosophila mutants were made available to 123 teams elsewhere in an atmosphere of mutual 124 help (Kholer, 1994). Another signal initiative 125 was that of the network set up at the start of the 126 1980s by the Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme 127 humain (CEPH; Centre for the Study of Human 128 Polymorphism) to map the human genome, on