Medical research without patents: It's preferable, it's profitable, and it's practicable.

This article addresses the question of the possibility of medical research without patents, a major issue in healthcare research and policy. We discuss and evaluate the relevant scientific, economic, societal, and moral aspects of our system of funding and organizing the research, development, manufacture and sale of prescription drugs. The focus is on the patent practices of big pharmaceutical companies. We analyze and critically assess the main features and impacts of these practices. In a positive sense, we propose an approach to organizing and funding drug research that prioritizes its public interest rather than its privatization through patenting. For these purposes, we first demonstrate that producing prescription drugs through patenting has serious drawbacks. Second, we develop a concrete alternative (medical research without patents) that is shown to be scientifically, socially and morally preferable, economically and financially profitable, and socio-politically and organizationally practicable.

How (not) to be held accountable in research: The case of the Dutch integrity code.

The article starts with a concise explanation of the nature and role of values and norms. I emphasize the ethical and political importance of making explicit how values are interpreted and which norms are taken to advance them in concrete situations. Next, I apply this account in a critical examination of the recent Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. The conclusion is that this code is based on a flawed conception and an inadequate analysis of the nature and role of values and norms in science. Finally, I briefly sketch how the defects of the integrity code might be remedied by developing policies based on the broader notion of the public interest of science.

The Academic Manifesto: From an Occupied to a Public University.

Universities are occupied by management, a regime obsessed with 'accountability' through measurement, increased competition, efficiency, 'excellence', and misconceived economic salvation. Given the occupation's absurd side-effects, we ask ourselves how management has succeeded in taking over our precious universities. An alternative vision for the academic future consists of a public university, more akin to a socially engaged knowledge commons than to a corporation. We suggest some provocative measures to bring about such a university. However, as management seems impervious to cogent arguments, such changes can only happen if academics take action. Hence, we explore several strategies for a renewed university politics.

The philosophy of scientific experimentation: a review.

Practicing and studying automated experimentation may benefit from philosophical reflection on experimental science in general. This paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses central issues in the philosophy of scientific experimentation. The first two sections present brief accounts of the rise of experimental science and of its philosophical study. The next sections discuss three central issues of scientific experimentation: the scientific and philosophical significance of intervention and production, the relationship between experimental science and technology, and the interactions between experimental and theoretical work. The concluding section identifies three issues for further research: the role of computing and, more specifically, automating, in experimental research, the nature of experimentation in the social and human sciences, and the significance of normative, including ethical, problems in experimental science.

Exploiting abstract possibilities: a critique of the concept and practice of product patenting.

Developments in biotechnology and genomics have moved the issue of patenting scientific and technological inventions toward the center of interest. In particular, the patentability of genes of plants, animals, or humans and of genetically modified (parts of) living organisms has been discussed, and questioned, from various normative perspectives. This paper aims to contribute to this debate. For this purpose, it first explains a number of relevant aspects of the theory and practice of patenting. The focus is on a special and increasingly significant type of patents, namely product patents. The paper provides three general arguments against the concept and practice of product patenting. The first argument briefly considers the claim that patents are legitimate because they promote socially useful innovation. Against this claim, it is argued that product patents may hamper rather than promote such innovation. The second and main argument concludes that product patents are not adequately based on actual technological inventions, as they should be according to the usual criteria of patentability. The principal moral issue is that product patents tend to reward patentees for inventions they have not really made available. The final argument proposes a method for patenting the heat of the sun. Assuming that granting this patent will be generally considered absurd, the argument exposes a further, fundamental problem of the concept and practice of product patenting.