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Following decades in which China’s approach to technology has been to imitate, the country is now transforming itself to become innovation-oriented. This pioneering study examines whether patents play a similar role in promoting innovation in China as they do in the West, exploring the interplay between patents and China’s biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in particular.

Innovation and Liability in Biotechnology introduces and articulates an innovative framework, the Liability Analysis Framework (LAF), which offers a new perspective from which stakeholders and society can assess, manage and communicate about liability in relation to innovation. This path-breaking book provides a detailed description of the relationship between risk and liability. Risk and liability are not synonymous and the fact that, at times, the terms have been used in very close proximity has resulted in confusion and misunderstandings.

Intellectual property rights (IPRs), particularly patents, occupy a prominent position in innovation systems, but to what extent they support or hinder innovation is widely disputed. Through the lens of biotechnology, this book delves deeply into the main issues at the crossroads of innovation and IPRs to evaluate claims of the positive and negative impacts of IPRs on innovation.

Starting with the 13th century, this book explores how patents have been used as an economic protectionist tool, developing and evolving to the point where thousands of patents have been ultimately granted not over inventions, but over isolated or purified biological materials. DNA, invented by no man and once thought to be ‘free to all men and reserved exclusively to none’, has become cartelised in the hands of multinational corporations. The author questions whether the continuing grant of patents can be justified when they are now used to suppress, rather than promote, research and development in the life sciences.

This book explores the EU’s elaborate regulatory framework for GMOs, which extends far beyond the process of their authorisation (or not) for the EU market, embracing disparate legal disciplines including intellectual property, consumer protection and civil liability. The regulation of GMOs also highlights questions of EU legitimacy in a context of multi-level governance, both internally towards national and local government, and externally in a world where technologies and their regulation have global impacts.

This book documents and evaluates the dramatic expansion of intellectual property law to accommodate various forms of biotechnology from micro-organisms, plants, and animals to human genes and stem cells. It makes a unique theoretical contribution to the controversial public debate over the commercialization of biological inventions.

This book will make a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the effective regulation of biotechnology. The contributing authors assess how regulatory regimes can accommodate the many different and often conflicting issues to which biotechnology is giving rise to (including a very tainted public image). The book’s ultimate aim is to explore ways of designing a regulatory regime that takes heed of these different demands whilst, at the same time, answering to the imperatives of effectiveness and efficiency.