Duke Center for the Study of Public Genomics

Duke's Center for the Study of Public Genomics will gather and analyze information about the role of publication, data sharing, materials-sharing, patenting, database protection, and other practices that affect information flow in genomics research and development. Managing intellectual property and ensuring the preservation of a robust "scientific commons" could prove as difficult as or more so than the science and technology, and could have as large of an impact on what results are produced, who has access to them, and how fairly they are distributed. These are deeply ethical questions, highly dependent on policy decisions in government and the private sector. Intellectual property is new to the ELSI scene, but it is here to stay.

The Center will combine qualitative and quantitative research and analysis involving Duke Arts & Sciences, the Medical School, Law School, Fuqua Business School, Sanford Institute for Public Policy, as well as the DNA Patent Database at Georgetown University. The Center builds on structures designed to enable collaborative research at Duke and with external organizations. The Center will bring together economists, legal scholars, molecular biologists, computational biologists, philosophers, English professors, and others. It will combine research training with Center research activity.

The pervasiveness, importance, complexity, uncertainty, and persistence of concerns about the role of intellectual property will be addressed in four research projects, supported by four cores. The projects are:
-case histories, including intellectual property landscapes of seminal genomic technologies and data sharing practices (DNA sequencing and microarray technologies, data-release and data-sharing practices);
-models of open and collaborative production in genomics research and development;
-intellectual property protection of databases and alternative regimes to reconcile public science with the commercialization of research results; and
-empirical analysis of information flow in genomics based on a pilot survey. (Co-fund with DOE)