Living Inventions: Genetically Modified Organisms and the Canadian Patent System, 1976-2004
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Living Inventions: Genetically Modified Organisms and the Canadian Patent System, 1976-2004 Rebecca Moore Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation tells the history of the interaction between the Canadian patent system and conceptions of the organism. Although organisms have been modified by humans for millennia, their entry into the patent system demanded they be understood as human inventions in accordance with the requirements of the Patent Act. It was not enough for an organism to simply be modified by humans; instead, the modified organism had to be seen as designed and controlled by a human inventor. I explore how the organism became conceived as a living invention during the patent process. The result is a contemporary history that sheds light on Canada's current, convoluted approach to the patenting of organisms, where "lower" organisms are patentable in their entirety and "higher" organisms are not, yet patents on pieces of "higher" organisms (i.e., patents on genes contained within an organism) give the inventor control over the whole organism. This dissertation is organized around two questions: 1) How was the organism described in the Canadian patent system? 2) Why was the organism described in this way? These questions are explored through a close analysis of four key patent applications filed with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, beginning in 1976, and their subsequent journey through the Canadian judicial system. I argue that in order to answer these questions, these cases must be understood in the context of the nexus between the molecularization of biology, government and corporate investment in biotechnology, and the nature of legal protection provided by the state. It is only at this nexus that one can explain why whole, modified organisms found their way into the patent system in the first place while also illuminating how - as a consequence of their entry into the patent system - organisms were described.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".