International Journal of Development in Social Sciences and Humanities

With innovation in the genetic engineering now being rewarded in the form of intellectual property rights, there are new things that are beginning to count as property and as objects of human invention – plant varieties, seeds, germplasm, genetic sequences, DNA and so on. To bring the realm of “biology” within the ambit of intellectual property, to juridify aspects of the biological as products of human invention is to bring new epistemic objects into visibility. While these are revealed through practices of biotechnology, law translates it into a capacity for monopolistic appropriation for biotech innovators. The new correlatives of innovation and intellectual property re-engineer not just the biology of an organism, but the very categories that organized property and intellectual property. What instrumentalities of technology and law co-produce biotic property? I examine these instrumentalities in a two paper series: while the first paper sought to lay out the work of technology in the creation of new biological artefacts, and consequently new economic spaces and property claims, the second paper seeks to examine the role of law in translating inventive claims as property claims.