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During the 20th century, scientific practices positioned genetic resources as a global public good travelling more or less freely between scientists and nations. More recent use of patents to protect inventions from biotechnologies has dramatically changed these practices by turning these resources into private commodities. As a result, several international agreements and national intellectual property regimens currently exist to navigate between a system that would afford free access to the resources by facilitating their appropriation (without counterparts) and a system of contractual access generating trade-offs to exclusive appropriation. This article focuses on the confrontation and also the hybridizing of these two philosophies since the 1990s. It addresses the issue of how to build good governance of these global public goods in light of the very exclusive rights granted by patents.