The panel will feature Sherry Glied, Arti Rai, Joseph Stiglitz, Sir John Sulston, and Harold Varmus.

This symposium will consider the implications of the private ownership of scientific knowledge, particularly in the critical area of global public health. Scientific, economic and legal perspectives will be employed to address the ways in which global knowledge commons can be managed to make scientific advances once again benefit those who most need them. Panelists will discuss the current intellectual property regime, and whether there are ways to restructure public health research to make it more useful to vulnerable populations and the developing world.

Sherry Glied is Chair and Professor of the Health Policy and Management Department at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

Arti Rai is Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke University.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001.

Sir John Sulston is Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2002 for his work in sequencing the human genome. Sulston is leading campaigner against the patenting of human genetic information.

Harold Varmus is President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. As Director of the National Institutes of Health, he advocated for an open access system for scientific research, arguing the scientific knowledge should be available to all.