On Tuesday 12 June, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Catherine Rhodes entitled ‘Sovereign Wrongs: Ethics in the Governance of Pathogenic Genetic Resources’. Rhodes is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, where she researches how science can address humanity’s major challenges, with a focus on the interplay between science and international processes. Her lecture is based on a paper she published of the same name [1].

Rhodes’s lecture raised the question of who owns ‘pathogenic genetic resources’, meaning …