Abstract Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious and urgent global health challenge that is often presented as a war on “superbugs.” The implicit message is that certain pathogenic microbes should be eliminated. With a focus on AMR innovation, I explain how microbes have been relegated to an abstract notion of property that may be controlled, manipulated, and owned. In this context, the treatment of microbes merely as an exploitable resource renders redundant ecological evaluation since only anthropocentric needs matter. Drawing on insights and concepts from the humanities and social sciences, I explain what ecological equity means when microbes are recognised to have moral value, creative agency, and situated knowledge. By this view, the patent system becomes inherently unfair because it neither considers nor rewards the inventive contributions of microbes. It also does not consider the ecological impact that an invention may have. Social institutions (like patent systems) that apply to AMR innovation must shift away from the human–nonhuman divide and adopt an ecological or biocentric approach to allow both human and microbial environments to flourish. I argue that the attribution of rights to microbes not only helps to realise this end but also enables conceptual cross-pollination across law, the humanities, and social sciences and steers the “greening” of legal regimes that apply to AMR innovation.
Calvin W. L. Ho (Thu,) studied this question.