Indian American Health Justice Lawyer Priti Krishtel Awarded the Prestigious McArthur Fellowship
- She is among a diverse class of musicians, artists, writers, activists, and academics who showed “exceptional creativity.”
Indian American health justice lawyer Priti Krishtel of California is among 25 artists, activists, scholars, and scientists chosen as this year’s McArthur Fellows for showing “exceptional creativity,” the McArthur Foundation announced today.
Known colloquially as the “Genius” award — “to the sometime annoyance of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — the MacArthur Fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000 to be awarded over five years,” as reported by The New York Times. “This year’s diverse class includes musicians, artists, writers, activists, plenty of hyphenates and many, many academics,” The Washington Post notes. It is composed of 15 women and 10 men, who hail from 15 states, the foundation says.
The citation says, Krishtel, 44, the lawyer, is exposing the inequities in the patent system to increase access to affordable, life-saving medications on a global scale. By distilling the technical aspects of the patent system to show its sometimes devastating impact on people’s lives, she is galvanizing a movement to center people instead of only commercial interests in our medicines patent policy.
Early in her career, Krishtel worked to increase access to antiretroviral (ARV) treatments at the height of the global AIDS epidemic, the foundation said in her profile. She worked alongside patients dying of AIDS and saw first-hand how patent monopolies often reduced the availability of life-saving medications in lower-income countries.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she has argued powerfully that incentivizing innovation should not come at the expense of equity and public health.
In 2006, she co-founded the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) to ensure the public had a voice in the pharmaceutical patent system. “Krishtel and the organization are drawing attention to weaknesses within the patent system while identifying needed reforms to make it more responsive to the public good,” the foundation said.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she has argued powerfully that incentivizing innovation should not come at the expense of equity and public health. Particularly during public health emergencies and for taxpayer-funded research, commercial and public interest concerns can be balanced. She is increasing the understanding of how intellectual property policy can impact personal, public, and global health care, and she and I-MAK are envisioning a patent system that benefits all people regardless of geography and economic status.
”I think a lot about who owns our right to heal,” the foundation quoted her as saying. Noting that we “live in a hierarchy of health,” she states that “some people get medicine first, and some don’t get it at all.”While “our ability to heal should not depend on our ability to pay or where we live,” she notes that “it does.” And for that reason, “medicine must always be a global public good.”
Krishtel received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD from the New York University School of Law. She worked with the Indian NGO Lawyers Collective before co-founding the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) in 2006, where she is currently the co-executive director. She has published in a variety of scientific journals and media platforms, including Science, Journal of the International AIDS Society, The British Medical Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and USA Today.
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