One factor which helps to explain this neglect is the fact that the development of intellectual property policy and law has been dominated by an epistemic community comprised largely of technically minded lawyers. In their hands intellectual property has grown into highly differentiated and complex systems of rules. The development of these systems has been influenced in important ways by the narrow and often unarticulated professional values of this particular group. For policy makers around the world, the challenge of the coming bio-digital millennium will be to define efficient property rights in information. The precise nature and scope of these property rights will affect not only the workings of the intellectual property regime, but the trade and competition regimes. No legislature, no policy-maker can, in the quest for efficient property rights, afford to rely on a narrowly constituted epistemic community. The stakes are too high.