Towards an Understanding of the Right to Enjoy the Benefits of Scientific Progress and Its Applications

Both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights enumerate a right to the benefits of scientific progress, but science is rarely addressed through a human rights lens. Nor has the human rights community systematically addressed the requirements of this right. This article seeks to stimulate the process of conceptualizing the right by offering some initial thoughts. It first reviews the right to the benefits of scientific progress in international human rights law and its historical background. The article then defines the key terms of science, scientific progress, and access to the benefits of science. The next section considers the human rights principles relevant to a human rights approach to the benefits of science. The article then considers what it means to respect the freedom indispensable for scientific research. Three sections follow exploring the obligations to respect, to protect, and to fulfill in relationship to the conservation, development, and diffusion of science. The article goes on to explore the international components of the right. The final section is a brief conclusion. Audrey R. Chapman is Professor of Community Medicine and Healthcare and holds the Healey Memorial Chair in Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Prior to coming to the University of Connecticut in July 2006, she served as the Director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is the author, coauthor, or editor of 16 books and numerous articles and reports. Her publications include Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (with Hugo van der Merwe), Designing Our Descendants: The Promises and Perils of Genetic Modifications (with Mark Frankel), and Core Obligations: Building a Framework for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (with Sage Russell). Notes 1. In June 2007 UNESCO sponsored the first of an anticipated series of workshops dedicated to conceptualizing the right to the benefits of scientific progress. Each of the papers presented at the workshop focused on the interrelationship between this right and another right recognized in the Covenant. This author attended and gave a paper on the interrelationships between the rights to health and to the benefits of scientific progress. This approach, however, lends itself more to seeing the right to the benefits of scientific progress as subsidiary to other better recognized rights rather than a right in itself. A second meeting will take place in November 2008 addressing aspects of the right itself. 2. Commissioned by the WHO Commission on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Public Health, 2005, http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/studies/stats/en/index.html. The authors found an increase in indicators of innovative activity (patenting and bibliometric citation) related to some diseases specific to developing countries between 1980 and 2002, but only the subset still in need of better, low-cost treatments. The authors found a downtrend in innovative activity among the subset for which treatments already exist. The authors suggest that although the increase in innovation coincides in part with the introduction of stronger patent protection in developing countries, increased public R&D funding for global health and political developments are likely to have made significant contributions over the same interval. Still, drug innovation targeting developing countries remains a tiny fraction of drug innovation overall.