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Continue reading →: Secrets to Patents at the Vestigia Conference in Zagreb
During the Pro Tempore arranged Vestigia Conference at the University of Zagreb, the projects’ Cecilia Lundström presented on egodocument research. The Secrets to Patents project relies to a large extent on egodocument, as much of the source material consists of letters or similar. Egodocuments are important to lift, study and…
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Continue reading →: Global History Seminar at the Lund Division of HistoryIn the second half of 2025, Secrets to Patents took on the organization of the Global History Seminar at the Division of History of Lund University. Concluding the program on April 10, 2026 with a presentation by postdoctoral researcher Angana Moitra titled “Physic in India, Medicine in Scotland: The Presence…
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Continue reading →: Lecture on how global colonial entanglements shaped medicines as property
On March 20, the PI of Secrets to Patents gave a lecture at the Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar at Leiden University. Introducing the Secrets to Patents project, the presentation focused on how interdisciplinary research can yield new understandings of how medicine, law, and colonialism were intertwined in the creation…
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Continue reading →: Lecture by postdoc Angana Moitra
On April 7, postdoctoral researcher Angana Moitra gave a lecture at the English Literary Society of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi’s Annual Fest, Logos’26, which had the theme “Othering as Supernatural: Death of Resolute Corporeality”. On Logos’26, Moitra spoke on the topic The Witch as Other: Witchcraft as Marginalisation and Reclamation,…
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Continue reading →: New special issue on Animal Privacy
Spearheaded by the PI of Secrets to Patents, the new special issue for the Privacy Studies Journal is now out and available open access. Many aspects of historical and contemporary science depend on non-human animals as subjects of investigation or of testing of substances. While the privacy of human subjects…
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Continue reading →: New seminar series – Saúde, Saberes Tradicionais e PatrimônioThe Latin American branch of Secrets to Patents is launching a new seminar series dedicated to discussions on health, traditional knowledge, and heritage. The presentations and discussions will be in Portuguese and Spanish. Sign up via the link: https://forms.gle/x4VBCPJ16VqrFABQA
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Continue reading →: Gemma Milne’s Lecture on IP in ScienceOn March 11, 2026, Gemma Milne will give a lecture titled New Dog, Old Tricks: The central contradiction of intellectual property in “deep tech”, the latest wave of science solutionism at the Centre for Privacy Studies (University of Copenhagen), a partner institution of Secrets to Patents. The lecture is open…
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Continue reading →: “AI in the Academic World” keynote at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria’s cross-faculty conferenceSecrets to Patents’ PI, Natacha Klein Käfer, gave the opening keynote of the 40th Jornada Academica Integrada of the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. This university-wide event is the largest of the institution, and every year it showcases the research being developed at the Federal University. In its 40 years…
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Continue reading →: New article on digital tools for tracing discourse change in midwifery manualsThe journal Current Research in Digital History has recently released a new article by the Secrets to Patents PI, Natacha Klein Käfer, on the shifts in German midwifery texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century that can be detected using digital tools. The article points to evidence of how…
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Continue reading →: Healing knowledge on focus at the History of Knowledge ConferenceThe project Secrets to Patents in collaboration with the Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138) organized a panel at the 2025 History of Knowledge Conference at Lund University. With presentations by Liam, Benison, Jelena Bakic, as well as Ida Vos and Natália da Silva Perez’s joint paper, the panel brought to…
Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900
Secrets to Patents
The Project
The Research Environment Secrets to Patents investigates the long-term history of how life-saving and health-improving medicines became for-profit commodities from 1500 to 1900. Focusing on the Atlantic Colonial Nexus, the project’s team will investigate the strategies that different historical agents used to claim ownership of medicinal knowledge.
Funding
Secrets to Patents has been generously funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025-2030) and hosted at Lund University (SE), in collaboration with the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen (DK) and the History Department of Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (BR).
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