Abstract
Medical humanities have a central role to play in combating biopiracy. Medical humanities scholars can articulate and communicate the complex structures of meaning and significance which human beings have invested in their ways of conceiving health and sickness. Such awareness of the moral significance of medical heritage is necessary to ongoing legal, political, and ethical debates regarding the status and protection of medical heritage. I use the Indian Traditional Knowledge Digital Library as a case study of the role of medical humanities in challenging biopiracy by deepening our sense of the moral value of medical heritage.
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Notes
The irony, of course, is that the history of pharmacology owes much to the ‘biopiratical’ policies of colonial botany. See Schiebinger and Swan 2007.
There are a variety of international conventions for the protection of indigenous knowledge. These include: the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage 1972 (the UNESCO Heritage Convention); the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970 (the UNESCO Cultural Property Convention); the Convention Concerning Indigenous Peoples in Independent Countries 1986 (ILO Convention 169); and the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 (the CBD).
The legal disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples and their intangible cultural heritage may count as a form of ‘epistemic injustice’ in the sense articulated by Miranda Fricker (2009); indeed, it may class as a form of ‘persistent and systematic’ epistemic injustice (Fricker 2009, 27-29ff).
Coombe (2001) points out two particular problems. First, ‘continuous monitoring and challenging of patents requires resources that are well beyond the capacities of all but the most well-funded NGOs’ (281). One may have the weapons but be unable to afford to wage the war. Second, ‘traditional knowledge databases and community registers of traditional knowledge … are somewhat controversial and certainly not all indigenous peoples, traditional healers, or rural communities support them’ (283) (for instance, some knowledge may be classed as sacred, or be transmitted through rituals means, or processes of initiation). See Posey and Dutfield (1996) for a constructive discussion.
Vinod Gupta, personal communication, March 31, 2010.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Matthew Eddy, H. Martyn Evans, Vinod Gupta, Geoffrey Scarre and the journal referees for providing useful information, comments, and references.
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Kidd, I.J. Biopiracy and the Ethics of Medical Heritage: The Case of India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library’. J Med Humanit 33, 175–183 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9179-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9179-3