1. Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in Genomic and Protein Research and Innovation, Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy, Committee on Science, Technology, and Law: Policy, and Global Affairs, National Research Council, Reaping the Benefits of Genomic and Proteomic Research: Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Public Health (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005), 22. Hereafter, NRC, Reaping the Benefits. Shortly thereafter, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the lead agency in the project, chimed in, holding that the data should be “in the public domain, and redistribution of the data should remain free of royalties.” Ibid.
2. Parts of this chapter first appeared in Daniel J. Kevles, “Genes, Disease, and Patents: Cash and Community in Biomedicine,” in Caroline Hannaway, ed., Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008), 203–216. I am grateful to Peter Westwick for research assistance and for support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
3. Daniel J. Kevles and Ari Berkowitz, “Patenting Human Genes: The Advent of Ethics in the Political Economy of Patent Law,” Brooklyn Law Review 67 (Fall 2001): 237.
4. This section is based on Pauline Maier et al., Inventing America: A History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 518–523.
5. Government Accounting Office, DOE’s Physics Accelerators: Their Costs and Benefits (GAO: RCED-85–96, April 1, 1985), 45.