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Planting the Techno-Medical Flag: Insulin Pumps, Intellectual Property, and Fractured Medical Device Ownership

Thu, November 8, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Westin Peachtree, Floor: Seventh, Augusta 3 (Seventh)

Abstract

Since the 1970s, biomedical researchers have funneled massive resources into developing and marketing portable insulin pumps-medical devices that allow people with Type 1 Diabetes to carry several days-worth of insulin and inject it via the pump's tubing on an as-needed basis. This means fewer needles and syringes, making the average 4 to 7 insulin injections per day much simpler and easier on the body. As these devices are connected to people's bodies providing constant medical treatment all day, every day, inulin pumps come to function not simply as medical periphery or attachments, but as deeply intertwined constituents of the body.

That techno-medical integration process is made particularly problematic, however, by contemporary definitions of property and ownership. While individuals claim ownership of insulin pumps through possession and use, pump manufacturers claim ownership of those same devices (or at times their constituent parts) through patents and intellectual property. Ownership is made the more complex and fractured as medical insurance companies front the capital for purchase transactions between individuals and manufacturers.

In this paper, I interrogate these contested property claims by comparing patents filed by Medtronic, Inc. (the largest insulin pump producer in the U.S.), the license and use agreements they include with pump purchases, and interviews with individual pump users. As insulin pumps become extensions of personhood and the self through consistent use and possession, I argue, the contested and distributed property claims to those devices create contested sites of personhood as well-an embodied personhood that is branded by an ever-attached technological "flag."

Calling attention to these muddy in-between spaces of conflicting legal definitions provides a lens not only into the issues of those definitions themselves, but of the bioethics of medical device use within the contemporary U.S. more generally. In so doing, this unique embodied experience of Type 1 Diabetes within a system of biomedicalized compulsory able-bodiedness draws intellectual connections between Medical Humanities, Crip Theory, and Science and Technology Studies, and helps to expand critical frameworks to better include the compelled use of medical devices by people with chronic illness.

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