Intended for both business people and legal practitioners, this book offers a practical conceptual framework for the analysis and implementation of cross-border technology transactions, as well as alerting potential parties to technology transfers to the salient issues they should systematically confront and resolve as they seek to structure and implement their transaction. Particular attention is devoted to the identification of traps in the path of successful international-technology transfer. The term "technology" is used in the book in its broadest possible sense, including what in some countries is referred to as "industrial property" and encompassing all legal categories of intellectual property, such as copyrights, trademarks, patents, know-how and trade secrets. The book applies an interdisciplinary approach to a complex and interdisciplinary subject and seeks to harmonize the frequently divergent perspectives that business people and lawyers bring to technology transactions. The topics covered include intellectual-property regimes and how to safeguard one's proprietary rights in technology; contractual provisions; tax structures and tax implications of technology-transfer transactions; and conflicts of law, choice of law and dispute resolution in the international technology-transfer context.

Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward a natural philosophy of organic life.

Explicitly repudiating "vitalism" (the notion that the laws of nature need to be modified when applied to living organisms), Elsasser argues instead that the structural complexity of even a single living cell is "transcomputational"--that is, beyond the power of any imaginable system to compute. Beginning from this insight, Elsasser leads the reader through a step-by-step process that ultimately arrives at the conclusion that living and non-living matter are separated by "a no-man's land of irrationality."

Trained in Germany as a physicist, Elsasser first pondered the implications of quantum mechanics for biology as early as 1951. The more closely he studied the inherent complexity of life, the more skeptical he became of the reductionist view of organisms as tiny machines. "An organism," he concluded, "is a source of causal chains which cannot be traced beyond a terminal point because they are lost in the unfathomable complexity of the organism." Like the physicist who works within the bounds of an unfathomable universe, Elsasser argues, the biologist must seek answers within a system that is no less unfathomable.

This book addresses possible analogies between cancer and developmental biology. An international group of experts provides a multidisciplinary approach, allowing biological or clinical scientists involved with cancer research to integrate specific information from diverse areas.
Five concepts of cancer are presented, and developmental biology is reviewed at five levels. These are integrated in discussions of failure in organisation as a basis of cancer and its control. The book will be a valuable reference for both newcomers as well as experienced biological and clinical scientists.
Features