Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology

The story of the commercialization of biology by a pioneer in biotechnology patenting

Shortly after the emergence of genetic engineering in the 1970s, academic biologists were courted by venture capitalists and multinational companies. Researchers who understood the new biology of the time went from being merely curious about how the natural world functioned to realizing that they could profit from their newfound recognition. As they were inventing all sorts of newfangled organisms, biologis...