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Secrets to Patents

Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900

New special issue on Animal Privacy

Published by

Natacha Klein Käfer

on

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 is a matter of strict regulations, non-humans are denied bodily autonomy and protections from scrutiny. This special issue deals with this subject at the intersection of historical and animal studies, with articles dealing with ethics, surveillance, and interspecies interactions in zoos, courts, scientific experiments, and daily life.

You can read it online at https://tidsskrift.dk/privacy_studies_journal/issue/view/13131

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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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