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.