Recent years have seen a remarkable increase in patents in the field of information, communication and entertainment (ICE) technology and biotechnology. The growth of patents in those areas has triggered serious concern about access to ICE and genome related inventions, as the rise of patents...

In the delicate interaction between intellectual property and public interest, two antinomian questions come to the fore. The first question is to what extent patent law guarantees public interest, contributes to public interest or, on the contrary, limits public interest. The second question is...

South Africa recently enacted legislation similar to the US. Bayh-Dole Act, which permits publicly funded institutions to obtain patent rights in hopes that the patent incentive will foster commercialization, as well as generate revenues to the funded institutions and scientists. While enacting...

There has been a continuing growth in urbanisation in developing countries, and governments’ face a major challenge in ensuring that city dwellers are able to procure sufficient food. Street foods are sold in almost every country in the world. In most towns and cities in Ghana, selling of...

Once a humble, beloved, charity-based arm of the healthcare industry, hospice is now a multi-billion dollar industry, funded almost exclusively by Medicare, run by for-profit corporations answering to private equity investors and Wall Street, and more and more frequently plagued by fraud and...

Public health emergencies from natural disasters, infection, and man-made threats can present ethically or legally challenging questions about who will receive scarce resources. Federal and state governments have offered little guidance on how to prioritize distribution of limited resources....

The Royal Decree 1015/2009, June 19th 2009 (RDDMSE) aims to facilitate the access to drugs – the drug in question should be subject to a marketing authorisation application or must be undergoing clinical trials – before approval, in Spain, in patients with a chronical or severely...

Recent events have, once again, catapulted microbes into the forefront of media crisis-reporting. No sooner than the wandering TB-carrier evading the CDC's dragnet fades from our newspapers, (along with the sudden emergence and disappearance of SARS, the threat from Saddam's smallpox, and the...

This is a research proposal for a project to be completed during a part-time Non-Residential Lab Fellowship from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. The term of the project would be between September 2013 and June 2014. Complex ethical situations, such as end-of-life medical treatment...

High-cost, low-value care permeates much of the American health care system. Congress has begun attempting to address the issue by provisions in the Affordable Care Act encouraging a shift from pay-for-volume to pay-for-performance practices, and by funding clinical effectiveness research...