Patenting Race in a Genomic Age1

Abstract

In the growing field of biotechnology research and development, a new phenomenon is emerging – the strategic use of race as a genetic category to obtain patent protection and drug approval. The imbrication of race in the field of patent law as an adjunct to biotechnological inventions is producing new racialized spaces of intellectual property that may have profound implications for broader social understandings and mobilizations of race. When the federal government grants a patent to an invention that is based on an asserted or implied genetic basis for a particular racial group, it gives the imprimatur of the federal government to the construction of race as genetic. Moreover, once granted, such patents may provide the basis for similarly race-based clinical trial designs, drug development, capital raising and marketing strategies that carry the construction of race as genetic out to ever widening and consequential segments of society.