Fwd: "Owning knowledge" Public Health event from the Committee on Global Thought

The Committee on Global Thought presents,

Owning Knowledge: Science, Health and Law in an Integrated World

February 25, 2009
Wednesday, 6:30 pm
Discussion
Schapiro Center, Davis Auditorium

The panel will feature Sherry Glied, Joseph Stiglitz, John Sulston,
Harold Varmus, and Arti Rai.

This symposium will consider the implications of the private ownership
of scientific knowledge, particularly for such critical issues as
global public health. Scientific, economic and legal perspectives will
be employed to address the ways in which global knowledge commons can
be managed to make scientific advances once again benefit those who
most need them. Panelists will discuss how intellectual property
affects public health, and whether there are alternative ways that
public health research might be structured to make it more useful to
vulenrable populations and the developing world.

Sherry Glied is Chair and Professor of the Health Policy and
Management Department at Columbia University's Mailman School of
Public Health. Her principle areas of research are in health policy
reform and mental healthcare policy.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor of Economics at Columbia
University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for
his analysis of markets with asymmetric information.

Sir John Sulston is Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and
Innovation at the University of Manchester. He was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Medicine 2002 for his work in sequencing the human genome.
Sulston is leading campaigner against the patenting of human genetic
information.

Harold Varmus is President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine. As Director of the National Institutes of
Health, he advocated for an open access system for scientific
research, arguing the scientific knowledge should be available to all.

Arti Rai is Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke University. Her
current research, funded by the NIH, focuses on intellectual property
issues raised by collaborative R&D in areas ranging from synthetic
biology to drug development.