Public Lecture
Thursday 6 February 2025, 18:00 (BST); EB206
The event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please e-mail Prof. Dinusha Mendis at dmendis@bournemouth.ac.uk to book your place.
How should we understand the relationship between IP law, bioethics, and technology? A plausible starting point is that technological developments have disrupted law (including IP law) as well as posing new questions for bioethics.
In this lecture, we will go back to the disruption of the early 1990s when developments in genetic engineering were disrupting patent law and provoking bioethical interest in the much-contested idea of human dignity. This set up a three-sided debate between those who argued that IP law should operate to support the beneficial development of the new technologies, those who insisted that the priority was for the law to lay down clear red lines that should not be crossed by technologies (no matter how ‘beneficial’ they might seem to be), and IP lawyers who valued the coherence and workability of the law.
More than thirty years later, there continue to be tensions as new technologies, particularly AI, pose novel questions and challenges for both IP law and ethics as well as for regulators who are expected to strike the right balance between supporting beneficial innovation and managing unacceptable risks, and moreover to make their regulatory interventions at the right time and in the right way.
Professor Roger Brownsword, who is a graduate of the LSE, has been an academic lawyer for some 50 years, first at the University of Sheffield and then at King’s College London (where he was founding Director of TELOS in 2007). He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2003-2004, a member of the Law panel for the UK RAE2008 and then for the Hong Kong RAE2014.
He has published about 20 books, most recently Law, Technology and Society―Re-imagining the Regulatory Environment, and more than 250 chapters in books and articles. He is the founding general editor of Law, Innovation and Technology as well as being on the editorial board of the Modern Law Review, the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences.
From 2011-2015, he chaired UK Biobank’s Ethics and Governance Council; and he was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2004-2010). He has been a member of working parties in the Academy of Medical Sciences (on ‘drugs futures’) and the Royal Society (on neuroscience and the law, and on machine learning); and he has acted as a specialist adviser to parliamentary committees on stems cells and hybrid embryos.