4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST brain drain can perhaps be equated with a process whereby they capture the human resource itself that is input (i.e. the persons producing or capable of producing that knowledge). Moreover, given the fact that the patent regime has degenerated into reserving third world markets for the developed world's manufactured goods rather than protecting the actual interest of the inventive and innovative activities in the Third World, implying thereby that the location of such activities would remain confined to the political or economic boundaries of the developed countries, TRIPs would add to the brain drain of the talented and the ambitious men and women of the Third World to the locales of these activities in the West. Before I attempt a further elaboration on this presumably new perspective, let me very briefly put the issue of the world patent system in the context of the international transfer of technology. THE PATENT LAWS IN THE REALM OF INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY TRANSFERS The question of political economy of technology transfer from developed to developing countries has mainly been studied under two categories of issues: (1) The suitability or appropriateness of the technology transferred, and (2) The terms and conditions governing the transfer. With respect to the suitability of any transferred technology to a developing country one would normally come across two main arguments: (a) It is being argued that a technology designed, produced and innovated in a developed country is best suited to the resource endowments and needs of that developed country. It is therefore bound to be ill-suited to both the endowments as well as the needs of the developing country, (b) Imported technologies (whether from a developed or a developing country) are believed to be lacking the full support of modern science (by design and by limited capability respectively) and therefore to act as tools that condemn the third world countries to only second-best technologies. 'Alternative', 'appropriate' or 'intermediate' technologies, as some of the imported technologies are called, are thus suspect excepting when indigenously devised, planned and developed.2 While the second argument has often come in the way of a strong TCDC (technological cooperation among developing countries) for the purpose of technological transformation of individual developing countries, the first argument has often been compromised with to import western technology into the developing countries. This is perhaps because many a times the 'suitability' question is overridden by the theory of the 'advantage of the late-comer'. On the other hand, however, because not a large number of later-developing countries have shown signs of being able to fruitfully utilize the world stock of technical and scientific knowledge to industrialize, the technology transfer debate now clusters around the terms and conditions governing the transaction rather than the suitability or appropriateness of what