Reframing Property in the Age of Genetics

Property issues in relation to biological material have been a hot topic for a number of years. Courts and legislators throughout the world have struggled with classic notions of property when called upon to apply them to the human body. I will look at some of these approaches to property entitlements in this context and try to distil the underlying issues before turning to discussing how property might have to evolve to encompass new challenges in biomedical research. In particular, I hope to discuss the delineations between tangible property interests in biological specimens, and intangible property interests in the data encoded within the specimens. Where does a molecule stop being a tangible asset and start to become a representation of code?