The book was written while I was an associate research fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. During the time of the fellowship I benefited enormously from discussions with various scholars from the Centre and other faculties. In fact, the journey that led to this book brought me many friends and conversations that substantially contributed to what this book has become. It is impossible to mention them all, and to those whose names I do not mention, I can only say that I have restricted myself far more than I would have liked to do. I am particularly indebted to Denis Galligan, Naomi Creutzfeldt, Pavlos Eleftheriadis, John Gardner, Angeliki Kerasidou, Michael Parker as well as many participants in seminars, conferences and workshops at the University of Oxford, London, Edinburgh and Nottingham. I had the privileged opportunity to spend some time as a Caroline Miles visiting scholar at the Ethox Centre, a bioethics research centre in the University of Oxford’s Department of Population Health. The intellectual stimulation of the collegiate environment of Ethox proved instrumental in the formulation of some core ideas of the book and I thankfully acknowledge the financial support of the Caroline Miles scholarship. I am grateful for comments by the anonymous reviewer of this book. I am especially grateful to Andreas Panagopoulos for his insightful comments on patent law and policy. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 of the book have been previously published as a journal article with the title ‘Practical Reasoning, Impartiality and the European Patent Office: The Legal Regulation of Biotechnology’ in 2012 in the European Law Journal 18: 821–843. The publisher is thankfully mentioned here for permitting republication. Finally, I would like to thank my family, Andreas, my husband, and Ariadne, my daughter for all their support during the writing of this book. This book could not have been written without them.