Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the patenting of insects, particularly vectors of disease transmission, to probe the role of property law as a means of re-arranging the connections between humans, animals and the public domain.

Paper long abstract:

Property rights are a powerful mechanism for drawing the boundary between the natural and the artificial; they establish an anthropocentric vision of the world by conceptualizing a plethora of objects, substances, and beings as human invention. Yet the operations of property law, specifically the patenting of living organisms, tend to throw into disarray the very distinctions - between natural and artifactual, human and animal, technical and biological - that property law seems so eager to uphold. This has become again evident with the extension of patenting to insects, particularly mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are being genetically modified to use their vectorial capacities in disease-prevention strategies, and at the same time have increasingly become objects and carriers of property rights. This implies the patenting of a biological vector - an entity that links up and connects different species of being and in so doing disrupts the distinctions, separations and isolations that are so dear to property law.

The paper explores a few select cases in the patenting of insect vectors as a way of opening up new analytical venues on the entanglement of humans with other forms of being, and as a way of elucidating the movement of (property) law as confounding connector across species.