Book Review -- 'Global Bio-Piracy: Patents, Plants and Indigenous Knowledge,' by Ikechi Mgbeoji, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, 311 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The past 25 years have seen a charged discourse about bio-piracy: the unequal access to benefits of genetic resources and local knowledge, and the intellectual property system's failure to adequately recognize Indigenous or non-western knowledge, while expanding property rights over life forms. Ikechi Mgbeoji fills a need for a specific definition of bio-piracy and chronicles bio-piracy as a legal and social phenomenon. The book's thesis is that the industrialized world uses “two distinct but mutually re-enforcing strategies” to perpetuate bio-piracy: institutional/juridical mechanism, and a gendered and racist construct of indigenous epistemology. Chapter 1puts bio-piracy in historical perspective, and argues that national and global patent systems are vulnerable to manipulation and do not accommodate non-Western world views. Chapter 3 addresses international law concerning the conservation and use of plants and Indigenous knowledge, and examines the implications of bio-piracy for biological and cultural diversity. Chapter 4 expands on Mgbeoji's central thesis. Chapter 5 examines “the appropriative function of the interplay between patent systems of industrialized states and plant breeders' rights. The author discusses state responsibility under international law, arguing for the extension of such responsibilities to curb the menace of bio-piracy. The author explores and critiques various strategies of addressing bio-piracy, and elaborates on changes that would need to be made to the existing patent system to accommodate Indigenous knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.026 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".