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Following decades in which China’s approach to technology has been to imitate, the country is now transforming itself to become innovation-oriented. This pioneering study examines whether patents play a similar role in promoting innovation in China as they do in the West, exploring the interplay between patents and China’s biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in particular.

Innovation and Liability in Biotechnology introduces and articulates an innovative framework, the Liability Analysis Framework (LAF), which offers a new perspective from which stakeholders and society can assess, manage and communicate about liability in relation to innovation. This path-breaking book provides a detailed description of the relationship between risk and liability. Risk and liability are not synonymous and the fact that, at times, the terms have been used in very close proximity has resulted in confusion and misunderstandings.

Intellectual property rights (IPRs), particularly patents, occupy a prominent position in innovation systems, but to what extent they support or hinder innovation is widely disputed. Through the lens of biotechnology, this book delves deeply into the main issues at the crossroads of innovation and IPRs to evaluate claims of the positive and negative impacts of IPRs on innovation.

Starting with the 13th century, this book explores how patents have been used as an economic protectionist tool, developing and evolving to the point where thousands of patents have been ultimately granted not over inventions, but over isolated or purified biological materials. DNA, invented by no man and once thought to be ‘free to all men and reserved exclusively to none’, has become cartelised in the hands of multinational corporations. The author questions whether the continuing grant of patents can be justified when they are now used to suppress, rather than promote, research and development in the life sciences.