#11 – Margo Bagley - “What’s Yours is Mine and What’s Mine is Mine”: Digital Sequence Information, Patents, and Benefit-sharing Obligations

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM, Via Zoom, NC State University

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Corporate and academic synthetic biology researchers are using sequence information from untold numbers of organisms to develop improvements in diverse product areas from agriculture to therapeutics. Quite often, such information is being used, and patented, without regard to the origin of the particular organism from which it was derived; in fact, the researcher may not even know or be able to easily trace the original geographic source. However, the Nagoya Protocol (NP) on Access and Benefit Sharing to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), requires that users of genetic resources share the benefits of such utilization with the providers of the original resources. Although copious monetary benefits are being generated from synthetic biology-based products, there is little evidence to indicate that any meaningful benefit-sharing is taking place.

The issue of whether or to what extent digital sequence information (DSI) is subject to such obligations is a point of significant controversy in CBD/NP and FAO Plant Treaty discussions. This talk will explore positions on both sides of these issues as well as on the related issues of the feasibility of a global multilateral benefit sharing mechanism as a vehicle for users to comply with benefit-sharing obligations which are not amenable to the current bilateral benefit sharing model.

Speaker Bio

Margo A. Bagley is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. She rejoined the Emory faculty in 2016 after a decade at the University of Virginia, School of Law. She currently serves on the National Academies Committee on Advancing Commercialization from the Federal Laboratories, and previously served on the National Academies Committee on University Management of Intellectual Property: Lessons from a Generation of Experience, Research, and Dialogue. She is also an expert technical advisor to the African Union in several World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) matters and is the Friend of the Chair in the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. In addition, she served as a member of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources for the CBD and Nagoya Protocol. Her scholarship focuses on comparative issues relating to patents and biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and access to medicines, technology transfer, and IP and social justice.

LINKS

Related publications available on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Margo_Bagley

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