In the Conclusion, Gian Luca Burci, former Principal Legal Advisor to the World Health Organization, summarizes the arguments made by the book’s contributors, and situates them in the context of his decades at the leadership level of modern debates on pathogen sharing, international treaty-making, and material transfer agreements.

Chapter 10 “moves” the audience out of the scientific and ethical location in the theoretically low-resource but biodiverse country, and into the negotiating room where terms of sharing human pathogens occur. With decades of experience behind them, Mowatt and Ranjan cover the importance of human pathogen sharing from the perspective of the world’s most prominent biomedical research institution, the process through which sharing arises and is negotiated, the most frequent and salient barriers to sharing including isolating pathogens in the first place and then bargaining for them, mechanisms to reduce barriers to sharing including repositories and standardized agreements. Mowatt and Ranjan spend a significant amount of the chapter discussing the evolution of standardized agreements, and how those agreements functioned in recent public health emergencies including Ebola, Zika, and MERS-CoV. The authors identify common terms and conditions, disputes over publication and use of research results, rights in inventions developed during use, liability and other concerns. They provide nuance to these broad categories including the distorting influence of perceived value of material like devices or drugs, and proposed use such as discovery, pre-clinical, or clinical application.

Chapter 8 explores the mechanics of material transfer agreements that accompany transfers of pathogens. Material Transfer Agreements may seem abstract as a manifestation of changing norms in global infectious disease research. Yet, they are, fundamentally, legal agreements, contract, which must be negotiated and analyzed by both researchers and attorneys. Sherry Brett-Major, an attorney representing parties in technology transfer transactions, dissects material transfer agreements as contracts that regulated collaborative relationships. She identifies typologies of MTAs, areas of rights allocation where disputes are frequent, and key decisions that shed light on current MTA negotiation custom and practice. In addition to identify the critical components of MTAs that effectively facilitate collaboration, she provides some of the most significant decisions and disputes that may inform practices and pitfalls during the negotiation process.