Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs --- "Of Plants, Pills and Patents: Circulating Knowledge" [2012] ELECD 131; in Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison (eds), "Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies

Editor(s): Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802468

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Of Plants, Pills and Patents: Circulating Knowledge

Author(s): Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

1. Of plants, pills and patents:
circulating knowledge
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

This chapter considers the old and new `bio-contact zones',1 where exotic
plants, pharmaceutical application and patents co-inhabit a historically
contested universe. Both eighteenth-century exploratory travels into the
tropics as well as instantaneous (or stalled) sharing of bio-information in
the global biotech industry of today constitute, I argue, a space for
circulating knowledge. The geopolitics of movements within this sphere,
the travels, routes, and flows that enable (or disable) encounters and
exchanges, must not, however, be interpreted only in terms of a conven-
tional one-way only model of centre and periphery, neither when it comes
to the British Empire during the height of Queen Victoria's reign, nor when
situated within the intricacies of the present-day Empire of the World
Trade Organization (WTO) or the TRIPS Agreement 1994.2 Exchanges of
biological material and the knowledge of their uses enter a new phase with
Western expansionism, but have transpired between tropical countries as
much as from them to temperate zones only.3 Utter depletion at one end
and total accumulation on the other is too simple a précis of the move-
ments within this colonial exchange.4

1
Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt's well-known notion of `contact zone', Londa
Schiebinger coins `biocontact zones' to describe the exchange of plants and their
cultural uses. Schiebinger, Londa (2004), Plants and Empire: Colonial Bio-
prospecting in the Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard ...