WHO

'The Intellectual Property Turn in Global Health: From a Property to a Human Rights View of Health' by Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña in (2021) 36 Osiris comments 

 International intellectual property (IP) law for pharmaceuticals has fundamentally shifted in the twenty-first century from a property-centric to a human rights view. Scholars tend to explain this transformation in the context of both the power struggle between developing and developed countries, and the influence of a social movement that criticized IP rights as hindering access to essential medicines. Yet, these explanations leave out the central role of two international organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and particularly their permanent staffs, whose boundary disputes have shaped international IP law at the intersection of trade and global health. Bringing into conversation historical and legal literatures on global health and IP, this article traces how a human rights perspective on IP emerged as a strategy to reconcile the WHO staff’s sociomedical views of health with an increasingly dominant set of global IP rules. It shows how the WHO staff used the language of economics—an analytical frame favored by the WTO—to advance a then unorthodox economic understanding of IP as a type of governmental regulation. This allowed the WHO to argue that states should enjoy regulatory autonomy to curtail IP rights in order to meet broader state objectives, such as human rights protection. Paradoxically, despite their divergent views on the nature of IP, both WTO and WHO engagement with it heralded the emergence of a new technocratic view of global health that focuses on patentable medicines and technologies, and that has ultimately turned away from the WHO’s sociomedical roots.

'Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body' by Mario Biagioli and Alain Pottage in the same issue comments 

The histories of patent law and medical practice in the United States have intersected in various ways over the past 150 years, beginning with the professional campaign against “patent medicines” in the late nineteenth century, and culminating, for now, in attempts to patent the diagnostic procedures discussed in this article. The patenting of diagnostic procedures provokes a set of fundamental questions about the episteme of patent law. These questions are not new. They emerged at the very origins of patent jurisprudence, centered on the question of what distinguished an invention from a law of nature, and this question of patentability has persistently reemerged over the past century in the contexts of plant breeding, biotechnology, and now diagnostic medicine. So far, the question has been addressed in terms that imagine the invention as a machine, understood in the figurative sense of a transformative organization of forces and elements. But diagnostic procedures, because they address the body informationally, as a system based on the recursive patterning of signals rather than a linear transformation of inputs into outputs, stretch the figure of the machine to the point at which it ceases to be effective. How then should one define and delimit invention?