Patzke+Method+Empirical+Theory+2

Changes to this were mostly limited to the Method and Conceptual/Theory sections....

//Method// This study will be based on data collected through qualitative research methods including participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and discursive analysis of archival legal and policy documents. While intellectual property and gene sequencing seem unlikely bedfellows, commercial and research laboratories patent new discoveries in genetics research. But both genetics and law change as new discoveries, innovations, regulations and precedents are found, written and acted on. Multiple actors negotiate these interactions, including geneticists, lawyers, judges, and advocacy groups. Data collected will present a new understanding of how legal constructions of property are established in the law and migrate to laboratory work. Analysis of documents surrounding US cases such as //AMP v. USPTO//, as well as supplemental precedents such as //Prometheus v. Mayo//, //Metabolite, Bowman// and //LabCorp//, provide textual ‘evidence’ of the discourse of property as illustrated by legal adjudication.
 * __Intellectual Merit__**

//Empirical// Focusing on legal controversies and policy in the United States, this study contributes to the empirical record in a number of ways. First, it will expand the boundaries of legal analysis to scientific research represented in adjudication and create new methods of inquiry. Second, interviews and analysis will be archived in a public online archive accessible to researchers... Third, it will provide new understandings of the way knowledge of science is created and interpreted in the US legal system. Finally, this research will outline a ‘trail’ of analysis, presenting the ways in which knowledge of genes is ‘translated’ and implemented in the law and how those laws affect political and economic factors in society.

//Conceptual/Theoretical// This study will advance the conceptual framework of co-production by focusing on discourse analysis as a means to ‘see’ how social order is coproduced between law, policy, economics and science. While Jasanoff (year citation) focuses on the production of knowledge and social order through interactions between science and law (i.e., through regulations and adjudication), co-production lacks an account of economic and social consequences. In presenting a cohesive site of study through the study of human gene sequencing, one begins to see network structures (through discourse, interaction, and shared affiliations) that science (genetics) and law operate in relation to identifying (and economically protecting) intellectual (intangible) property and new discoveries in science.

//General impact:// By focusing on the ways in which adjudication influences laboratory practices, this project unveils complicated legal and scientific work to recognize the interdisciplinary practices of genetics.
 * __Broader Impacts__**

//Policy Impact//: Highlighting the interaction of legal adjudication and laboratory work allows for a transparent view of the direct impact the latter has on the former. As controversies such as life patents play out in both the courtroom and the laboratory, it is my intent to provide a ‘road map’ of how policy reform in patent law might implicate for established practices in biotechnology research.