Public-private collaborations and the race to sequence Agrobacterium tumefaciens

The article presents various issues related to the public-private collaborations and the race to sequence Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The article is divided into three parts: the first explores the emergence of two separate public-private collaborations following the failure or absence of either purely public or private initiatives; the second describes and analyzes the race itself and the dynamics of competition in the context of different types of intellectual property rights; and the final section discusses the implications of the mutual dependency and asymmetry of interactions between public and private sectors in knowledge creation.