Lunch & Learn with Jacob Sherkow
Room 282, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
FREE lunch will be served! RSVP by January 15th:
http://bit.ly/2PUFd2o
Prize drawing for students who RSVP and attend event!!
Scientific communities have long been seen as antagonistic to
intellectual property because it privatizes common resources or, in the case of
trade secrets, deprives communities of new knowledge altogether. But recent
developments in research technologies and scientific governance are beginning
to challenge this paradigm. For some, and in contrast to earlier scholarly
accounts of the practice, intellectual property can be viewed as a necessary if
inconvenient feature of even basic research subject to the governance of the
community itself. This seems especially true for scientific communities that
include commercial researchers who provide materials, technical assistance, and
research input. This Article explores this contrast to the canonical account of
intellectual property and scientific communities through the work of one such
community: the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Community (“the AIRR
Community”), a loose confederation of researchers devoted to genetically
sequencing cells of the immune system. The Article grounds its analysis in the technical
challenges facing the AIRR Community, scientific literature about genetic “big
data,” open discussions on intellectual property held during the course of the
AIRR Community’s annual meetings, structured interviews of scientists working
in the field, and the author’s own work as a member of one of the AIRR
Community’s working groups. The AIRR Community presents an apt case study for
this shift in attitudes concerning scientific communities and intellectual
property because it is likely indicative of similar technical challenges facing
a variety of scientific ommunities
today and the intellectual property issues they face. These include the rise of
industrial partners in scientific communities, the thinning of the line between
basic and translational research, a greater awareness of intellectual property
issues among scientists, complications with research globalization, and the
connection between intellectual property use and scientific integrity. This
suggests that scientific communities have—and should have—a greater
role in adapting intellectual property policies to their own ends. More
broadly, scientific communities should take up the mantle of tailoring
intellectual property policies for grant-funded research in their respective
fields, mitigate researchers’ technology assignment agreements with
universities, and more readily accept their role as standards setting
organizations. Ultimately, this Article serves to show that scientific
communities, far from being antagonistic to intellectual property, can adapt it
to their own ends.
Jacob S. Sherkow is the Edmond J. Safra/Petrie-Flom
Centers Joint Fellow-in-Residence at Harvard University, where his research
focuses on the legal and ethical implications of advanced biotechnologies,
especially as related to intellectual property. He is a leading expert on IP
protection for genome-editing technologies, including CRISPR. He is also
Professor of Law at the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at New York
Law School and a Permanent Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced
Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (“CeBIL”) at the University of Copenhagen
Faculty of Law. He is the author of over 40 articles published in both
scientific journals and traditional law reviews,
including Science, Nature, the Yale Law Journal, and
the Stanford Law Review. Prof. Sherkow’s
work has been recognized by both the scientific and legal communities. His
scholarship has won multiple prizes, including the 2018 Otto L. Walter
Distinguished Writing Award. In 2018, he was appointed to the National Academy
of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine.
Prior to joining Harvard, Prof. Sherkow held
visiting academic positions at Stanford Law School and Columbia University’s
Mailman School of Public Health. He has also been a patent litigator at Gibson,
Dunn & Crutcher LLP and a law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of New York. Prof. Sherkow
graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where
he was an editor of the Michigan Law Review and the recipient of the
Fred L. Leckie and James N. Adler Scholarships. He holds an M.A. in
biotechnology from Columbia University and a B.Sc. from McGill University,
where he majored in molecular biology and English literature. In addition to
his legal training, Prof. Sherkow has several years of experience as a research
scientist in molecular biology.