Biohacking for Everyone: Or How to Liberate Gene Therapy from Intellectual Property Regimes
Gene therapies, with astronomical price tags, are offering new treatments for a wide range of diseases. Synthetic viral vectors, which are very cheap to manufacture, are being used to deliver payloads of DNA to human cells. New genetic medicines are being developed to treat some kinds of cancer, blindness, and rare genetic conditions. The price of these therapies is derived from intellectual property regimes that are being contested by a new generation of thinkers, biohackers, and makers. This talk will consider themes of innovation and inequality, in the context of a new symbiotic model of capitalism.
Eben Kirksey is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is author of The Mutant Project (2020), an account of Jiankui He's infamous experiment that produced children whose genes were edited with CRISPR-Cas9. Thinking with Viruses (2027), his new book, considers the possibility of symbiosis with viruses and capitalism.
After the talk, the COPE project (Consumer Medicine: Philosophical and Ethical Implications), funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, will host an informal reception for continued discussion.