The Fictions of Autonomous Invention

The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession,
Commodification and Life Patents in Canada

by Scott Prudham

In 2002 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled to deny Harvard College a whole
organism patent over the oncomouse. In 2004, the same court ruled that Canadian farmer
Percy Schmeiser had violated Monsanto patents covering GM canola. Both decisions
rejected whole organism patents, running counter to US precedents. Yet both, nevertheless,
consolidate private claims to life as patentable inventions, and critics claim, with some support
from Justices in the Schmeiser case, that patents over genes amount to de facto patents over
whole organisms. In this paper I argue these cases are broadly consistent with the notion of accumulation
by dispossession as a means to expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation
via so-called ‘extra-economic’ means. As such, I examine the cases as privatizations, but also
as relational moments in the commodification of nature. However, in hoping to unpack and fill
out this notion of the extra-economic, as well as to critically examine the necessarily incomplete
character of commodification as a tendency, I look to the ways in which judges and interested
activists deliberate over the economic, legal, ecological, ethical, and even metaphysical arguments
and representations required to uphold discrete genes, processes, and whole organisms
as inventions.