Erratum: Patenting nature or protecting culture? Ethnopharmacology and indigenous intellectual property rights.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/jlb/lsw003.].

Patenting nature or protecting culture? Ethnopharmacology and indigenous intellectual property rights.

Ethnopharmacologists are scientists and anthropologists that study indigenous medicines and healing practices, and who often develop new therapies and medicines for wider use. Ethnopharmacologists do fieldwork with indigenous peoples in traditional societies, where they encounter a wide range of cultural values and varying ideas about the nature of property relations. This poses difficulties for protecting indigenous intellectual property and for making just trade agreements.

The molecularization of identity: science and subjectivity in the 21st century.

Recent advances in biological and computational technologies are changing the way different social groups imagine race, gender, kinship, citizenship and disease risk. Existing taxonomies are being displaced or reconfigured, impacting the ways in which people are governed, how lives are lived, how groups are known and how power is exercised. Herein we report on a two-day international symposium that we co-organized, titled 'The molecularization of identity: science and subjectivity in the 21st century,' that was held on 29-30 April 2016 at the Program on Science, Technology and Society, at Harvard University.

The collective nature of personalized medicine.

Precision medicine, incorporating personalized medicine, is an emerging medical model that holds great promise for improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. The future success of precision medicine, however, depends on the establishment of large databases that collate diverse data, including family genealogies, disease histories, drug sensitivities and genomic data. Herein I raise some of the social and ethical challenges that such a system faces, specifically: the enrolment of volunteers into large genetic databases; the need for a change in mindset of clinicians, patients and the wider public; and the need for interdisciplinary ethics considering the emerging issues.