Biotechnology Inventions and the Patent Regime

The primary purpose of this paper is to argue that the patent regime for biotechnology may accept patenting fragments of knowledge with the proviso that the formal knowledge and laboratory tools will be made available to everyone who wishes to develop that knowledge towards a marketable product and that the final product manufacturer would be held responsible for sharing the revenues recovered from the market with all the pioneers that contributed to the knowledge development and transfer. This may be, for example, proportional to the costs incurred at successive stages. Such a policy would ensure rapid diffusion of knowledge and technological development while leaving sufficient returns to innovators discoverers at each stage of knowledge accumulation.