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Patentbezogene Veranstaltungen
Ruth Chadwick
Director - CESAGen, Cardiff
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The Blue Skies scenario foresees a world in which health care will increasingly rely on huge interconnected databases. Public consultation about such databases (as in the Trees of Knowledge scenario) has revealed concerns about commercial involvement in such databases and a strong preference for public ownership. Debate about this requires going back to basics in thinking about the values associated with these activities as well as addressing practical mechanisms for accessing and distributing their benefits fairly. Should such databases be considered as global public goods and what would that mean? Public goods are good which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. They are enjoyable by all without detriment to others. Global public goods are ones which transcend national and international boundaries. The argument in favour of genomic databases being global public goods begins with the non-rivalrous nature of the information contained on the databases. It is non-rivalrous, given appropriate access goods: while the information may be non-rivalrous, however, it is not non-excludable, as is evidenced by commercial control in the case of some national initiatives. Are such initiatives, however, providing a global benefit? Their very nature might be construed as offering a local rather than a global benefit, in so far as they provide benefit at all. The justification of the African –American biobank (GRAD), for example, was that it would help in understanding and responding to diseases that differentially affect African-Americans. On the other hand it is suggested that the project has a broader relevance because ‘Africa is the trunk of the human evolutionary tree’. The idea of the human genome as the common heritage of humanity suggests that benefits should be shared. Databases may therefore have a double aspect, and this is recognised in the calls for harmonisation and linking between different initiatives, in both scientific and ethical terms, to provide maximum (global) usefulness. It has already been argued that databases have been implicated in changing trends in ethics: harmonisation between them for global utility will require even greater shifts.