Atypical "body packing syndrome"--a case report

A case of ingested cocaine is reported in which death must be classified as body packer syndrome although both the temporal relationship and the number of packets were atypical. The deceased, a consumer of hard drugs who smuggled for his own use, was found in his flat. He was resuscitated and survived for another four days in hospital. Only four intact drug packages were found in the upper gastro-intestinal tract. The concentrations of cocaine in blood and organs were relatively low but in a potentially lethal range. The case is presented, and its particularities as well as the option of induced vomiting as a way of preventing the fatal outcome are discussed.     

Legal perceptions of forensic DNA profiling part I: a review of the legal literature

A forensic biologist is usually involved in the criminal justice system process somewhere between the police and the legal system, interacting in a practical context regularly and extensively with both. Forensic DNA research and development commonly involves initiatives that encroach into the neighbouring domains of the law enforcement or legal agencies. Despite this level of association, establishing meaningful cross-disciplinary communication and understanding within the justice system remains a challenge. As an example, there is an abundance of literature relating to forensic DNA profiling in legal and criminological periodicals. Such journals are perhaps outside the regular reading of forensic scientists and much of the legal discussion appears to go unnoticed. This situation is understandable; however, it is also undesirable particularly as forensic DNA developments are intertwined with significant changes in legislation and contentious issues of privacy, civil liberty and social justice. This paper attempts to address this shortcoming directly by summarising - from the viewpoint of a forensic scientist - some of the discussion in the legal literature. In particular the review focuses on discussion raising ideological and ethical concerns. Awareness of these views is of relevance to forensic science. It assists us to accurately place DNA evidence into context and to develop its role in achieving the broader criminal justice system objectives. Understanding the discussion also provides a way to enter the debate and communicate at an appropriate level the true potential of DNA to the legal community.     

Knowledge transfer to emerging markets via consulting projects

In recent years, development agencies (DAs) have focused their activities on consulting projects rather than on financing turnkey projects when assisting emerging markets. The main reason is that the implementation of consulting projects is likely to be connected with an intensive knowledge transfer from developed to emerging markets. Training of local employees and cooperation with local firms are necessary elements to make the transfer effective. The empirical statistics shows training and cooperation to be more frequent in consulting projects financed by DAs as compared to commercial projects. According to theory and experience, training should be included in projects in the least developed host countries, whereas local cooperation should be more frequent, the higher is the development level of the host country. However, DAs do not follow these rules of thumb in a convincing way. A policy implication of the paper is therefore that DAs should better organize and plan the contents of their consulting projects.

Effects on academia-industry collaboration of extending university property rights

Several recent studies show European university scientists contributing far more frequently to company-owned patented inventions than they do to patents owned by universities or by the academic scientists themselves. Recognising the significance of this channel for direct commercialisation of European academic research makes it important to understand its response to current Bayh-Dole inspired reforms of university patenting rights. This paper studies the contribution from university scientists to inventions patented by dedicated biotech firms (DBFs) specialised in drug discovery in Denmark and Sweden, which in this respect share a number of structural and historic characteristics. It examines effects of the Danish Law on University Patenting (LUP) effective January 2000, which transferred to the employer university rights to patents on inventions made by Danish university scientists alone or as participants in collaborative research with industry. Sweden so far has left property rights with academic scientists, as they also were in Denmark prior to the reform. Consequently, comparison of Danish and Swedish research collaboration before and after LUP offers a quasi-controlled experiment, bringing out effects on joint research of university IPR reform. In original data on all 3,640 inventor contributions behind the 1,087 patents filed by Danish and Swedish DBFs 1990–2004, Difference-in-Difference regressions uncover notable LUP-induced effects in the form of significant reductions in contributions from Danish domestic academic inventors, combined with a simultaneous substitutive increase of non-Danish academic inventors. A moderate increase in academic inventions channelled into university owned-patents does appear after LUP. But the larger part of the inventive potential of academia, previously mobilised into company-owned patents, seems to have been rendered inactive as a result of the reform. As a likely explanation of these effects the paper suggests that exploratory research, the typical target of joint university-DBF projects in drug discovery, fits poorly into LUP’s requirement for ex ante allocation of IPR. The Pre-LUP convention of IPR allocated to the industrial partner in return for research funding and publication rights to the academic partner may have offered more effective contracting for this type of research. There are indications that LUP, outside the exploratory agenda of drug discovery, offers a more productive framework for inventions requiring less complicated and uncertain post-discovery R&D.

Strong life sciences in innovative weak contexts: a “developmental” approach to a tantalizing mismatch

Life sciences are the best developed area of academic research throughout Latin America. Biomedical research has been particularly successful. However, generally speaking, excellence in research has not been accompanied by commercially successful innovations, a pattern that differs from what has happened in many highly industrialized countries, even small ones. The paper explores some causes of such disappointing outcome, stressing in particular the historical lack of political and social legitimacy exhibited by innovation policies in underdevelopment. From a developmental point of view it is of great importance the building of such legitimacy. One way of doing so is to link more tightly innovation policies to social concerns; bio-innovation is suggested as a productive path towards that aim.