Bioethics: What would the Founders Say?

Professor Diana Schaub is giving a talk at Princeton on March 7, 2007 entitled "Bioethics: What would the Founders Say," which promises to get into the topic of concerns about what was being patented at the time of the Civil War.

A preview mentions

She [Schaub] further cites that even by the time of President Abraham Lincoln the patent process was getting into some dicey areas... [Lincoln] had reservations as to where certain patents were reaching.

LBE has an article in the December 2006 issue of JPTOS, which gets into certain Civil War patents: Lawrence B. Ebert, On Patent Quality and Patent Reform, 88 JPTOS 1068. As to the Jaffe/Lerner hypothesis that current problems have been created only in the last 20 years, one sees that an examination of history reveals that issues of "overreaching" in patent law have been around for a while.

Schaub's talk will likely discuss the patenting of gene sequences and issues of designer babies. Who knows, maybe embryonic stem cells?


[IPBiz post 2500]