Chapter 4 specifies the relevance of international human rights law in the context of the TRIPS at the junction of WTO law and IP law. This chapter explores the possibilities and limits of a coexistence perspective between IP and human rights. Accordingly, human rights are considered an integral part of the interpretative resources required to comprehend the TRIPS-stipulated obligations. This chapter focuses on human rights entailed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), such as the rights to health, food, and education, complementing the rich scholarship on the access modality of these rights (e.g., access to drugs, seeds, and educational material) by focusing on both the right to science and the right to self-determination as interpreted in a republican way. By interfacing with IP law, the right to science highlights the relevance of accessing scientific progress and its benefits while focusing mainly on the importance of a participative and inclusive approach to identifying and defining a population’s needs and priorities.

Graeme Laurie’s notion of reflexive governance, rooted in learning from experiences as issues arise, reminds us that the future is built upon past lessons. This chapter looks to the past better to understand our present and future. It begins with the past, examining the complex interaction of law, ethics and science through the prism of three types of human rights: the rights of children and decisionally vulnerable adults, the right to benefit from scientific advancement, and the rights of future generations. It traces the maturation of each from humble beginnings to playing an increasingly central role in biomedical research policy-making. It then turns to the future, largely uncertain but nevertheless responding to the past and the present. It contends that the future of policy-making is partly in the debates spurred by advances in epigenomics and microbiomics, human heritable genome editing, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Each has put our policy-making legacy to the test, illustrating how new ethical paradigms build upon older ones. It concludes by reflecting on the role that biomedical research policy plays in ensuring that science serves the interests of humanity above all else.