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"Preface" [2012] ELECD 129; in Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison (eds), "Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies

Editor(s): Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802468

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 4

Extract:

Preface
This collection is part of the Queen Mary Studies in Intellectual Property
series published by Edward Elgar. We were invited by Professor Graham
Dutfield to edit a collection on intellectual property and emerging tech-
nologies in the life sciences. Having explored gene patents and stem cell
patents in our research, we were particularly keen to explore new challenges
posed by paradigm shifts in biology. In 2009, the National Research
Council of the National Academies deployed the term `New Biology' to
capture the convergence and integration of the various disciplines of
biology:

The essence of the New Biology, as defined by the committee, is integration ­
re-integration of the many sub-disciplines of biology, and the integration into
biology of physicists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, and mathemati-
cians to create a research community with the capacity to tackle a broad range of
scientific and societal problems. Integrating knowledge from many disciplines
will permit deeper understanding of biological systems, which will both lead to
biology-based solutions to societal problems and also feed back to enrich the
individual scientific disciplines that contribute new insights.1

We invited a number of the pre-eminent researchers and scholars to explore
future trends and developments in a cluster of emerging scientific disci-
plines ­ including biodiscovery, genomics, medicine, bioinformatics, syn-
thetic biology, RNA interference, stem cell research, nanotechnology,
traditional knowledge, genetically modified crops, and clean technologies.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, the contributors are drawn
from an array of fields. Moreover, given the ...