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Name: Hyo Yoon
Family Name: KANG
Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Personal web-site: http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/hkang
Short BIO
Hyo Yoon Kang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin where her current project is concerned with the relationship between patent law and biological taxonomies. Her research interests combine property, social and legal theory, science studies, anthropology and intellectual property. She completed her PhD in Law at the European University Institute in Florence on a dissertation, entitled ‘Processes of Individuation and Multiplicity: the Human Person in Patent Law relating to Human Genetic Material and Information’. Previously, Hyo Kang was a teaching fellow in property law at the London School of Economics.
Title of the presentation
Property and Personhood: Notions of Agency in Patent Law relating to Human Genetics
Abstract
This paper explores notions of human and non-human agency in the context of intellectual property rights, in particular patents, relating to human genetic material and information. Rather than approaching the task normatively, such as addressing the question whether some patents infringe the value of human dignity, my focus here is rather on tracing the very shift in the meaning of the human agency, often equated with a privileged view of the self and personhood, that is brought about by technoscientific and patenting practices.
I develop my argument by showing that certain gene patents effect a triangular relationship between the human self, (intellectual) property and technoscientific practices, which contests the ethnocentric view of agency prevalent in property law. Understanding the process of embodiment, developed in particular by Katherine Hayles, as a central constituent of human subjectivity, I suggest that agency inheres in the process of oscillation between the embodied human subject and ideas of human personhood – or, personae - produced by technological practices and legal narratives.
Online publications
CPDP Conference Who is Who
