Patent protections are part and parcel of most international trade agreements, and Richard Gold, in his contribution, takes issue with the dominant discourses in the literature surrounding patents and human rights. He distinguishes three traditional positions in the debate: one position is that in the inherent clash between patents and human rights, the latter should prevail. A second view is that that patent rights are themselves a species of human right. And according to a third view, patent rights and human rights are different but compatible. Gold argues that the traditional approaches are incomplete and fail to recognize that human rights and patent rights are fundamentally different at the normative level and therefore incommensurable. Human rights, he suggests, are moral rights, whereas patent rights are contingent rights. In addition, human rights operate in his view primarily at the international level, whereas patent rights are primarily domestic. Picking up on the normative role of human rights law — whether at the international or domestic level — Trudo Lemmens argues it can be employed to strengthen the governance of pharmaceutical knowledge and to address the existing knowledge deficit resulting from industry-controlled scientific practice. He first discusses how the right to health is intrinsically linked to other human rights concepts (e.g., the right to information, the right to life, and the protection of “private and family life”). The human rights dimensions of access to reliable risk information can be invoked not only to reject data secrecy claims made in the context of international trade agreements, but also to impose a positive obligation upon states to actively support reliable knowledge production. Lemmens then goes on to advocate for a more conceptual use of human rights, as a methodology which requires a comprehensive analysis of the different interwoven historical, economic, cultural, and social factors that contribute to the current knowledge deficit. The claim that historically grown drug regulations have directly contributed to industry control over knowledge production is in this context particularly important for future law reform. The paper ends with the suggestion that strict transparency obligations should be integrated in the Framework Convention on Global Health, and that the WHO should reinvigorate its global leadership in the promotion and coordination of transparency measures.