Boggio, Andrea | Italy

Andrea Boggio is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at Bryant University located in Smithfield, Rhode Island (USA). He completed his doctoral studies at Stanford University where he graduate in 2003 with a JSD degree. He is the author of Compensating Asbestos Victims. Law and the Dark Side of Industrialization (Ashgate 2013) and the editor of Health and Development. The Role of International Organizations (Palgrave 2008) as well as the author of numerous papers appearing in peer-reviewed journals, including Social & Legal Studies, Critical Public Health, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the International Journal of Human Rights, and Human Reproduction. Before joining Bryant University, Andrea was a Lecturer at the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University (UK) and a post-doctoral researcher at Institute of the Biomedical Ethics, University of Geneva (Switzerland) where he conducted research in collaboration with Department of Ethics, Trade and Human Rights at the World Health Organization. Andrea is currently advising the ABA-UNDP Legal Resource Center with regard to the Fiji’s draft Mineral Act. His current research focuses on knowledge elites and the production, ownership and access to scientific knowledge. Andrea is also the principal investigator of a project on the freedom of research and medical treatment.

Project at IAS-STS: Knowledge elites

We live in a knowledge age in which ownership and access to scientific knowledge are contested. There is a clear tension between calls for openness and sharing of scientific knowledge and, more broadly, for the recognition of knowledge commons and the involvement of commercial interested in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. In this paper, I explore the historical roots of this tension going back to the emergence of scientific publications and looking at the key developments in the evolution of the relationship between commercial interest and the production of scientific knowledge. This analysis reveals that cultural repertoires that are deployed by advocates, scholars, and commentators in today’s debates over scientific commons run deep into the history of scholarship production and largely reproduce an inherent tension between openness and commercialization that has always contributed to the development of science since the 1600s. from there, the presentation will discuss how the divide between “haves” and “have nots” shape the knowledge age and what is the role of private interests. themes that will be discussed are (1) identifying the owners of knowledge that is vital to understanding and solving the challenges of our age, (2) analyse the conditions under which such knowledge can be accessed by non-owners, (3) and discuss the consequences of such arrangements on the way in which humanity is addressing the challenges of our time.

Selected Publications

Boggio, A.: Compensating Asbestos Victims. Law and the Dark Side of Industrialization (Ashgate 2013)

Boggio, A.: Linking corporate power to corporate structures: an empirical analysis, Social & Legal Studies (2013) 22: 107-131

Boggio, A.: Ethical Norms and the International Governance of Genomics: Findings from an International Study (with Alexander M Capron, Alexander Mauron, Bernice Elger, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, Nikola Biller-Andorno), Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 19(2)(2009): 101-124

Boggio, A.: Limitations on human rights: are they justifiable to reduce the burden of TB in the era of MDR and XDR-TB (first author with Matteo Zignol, Ernesto Jaramillo, Paul Nunn, Geneviève Pinet, Mario Raviglione), Health and Human Rights: An International Journal 10(1) (2008)

Boggio, A.: Italy Enacts New Law On Medically-Assisted Reproduction, Human Reproduction 20(5) (2005): 1153-1157