Slashdot Mirror
Should DNA be Patentable?
nexex writes: "This story seems brings the patent debate home; specifically, should a company or person be able to 'own' your DNA? Obviously researchers want to profit from their discoveries, thus funding new research. But critics counter they are profitting at the expense of our health, citing restrive screening licenses for things such as breast cancer and Alzheimer's. Citing a figure from a UK activist group, 500,000 gene or gene sequence patents have been applied for worldwide. Another excellent article on this issue from Salon.com was from a couple years ago."
next week:
* Should the Internet be shut down?
* Should Open Source be illegal?
If I discover a new comet, should any astronomer that wants to look at it through a telescope have to pay me royalties?
It's rediculous. And that's an example of something that doesn't effect human health (Unless the comet is going to smash into earth I guess).
I cannot see how this could be construed as anything other than choosing money over humanity. It's repulsive.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I think at some point, an international summit for "Things that belong to mankind" should be held and agreed upon.
Profit at the expense of public health has always been considered "wrong." But this is generally when it's a company unwilling to keep the air, water or land clean and safe for human habitation. But in cases such as patented AIDS drugs being suppressed when a far greater good could be served?
When mankind cannot 'afford' to be healthy or to survive, there is something very BROKEN in the way we are thinking. I'm not a communist, but get real... should one person DIE simply because he can't afford to live? It's all around us and no one is willing to say I'm wrong about that. But who is willing to actually step up to the plate and actually give to mankind rather than profit from its needs?
Sue first and ask questions later? That leads to the impasse defined in the third couplet of my 1992 poem:
N A. html
http://www.magicdragon.com/EmeraldCity/Poetry/D
THE TWILIGHT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
by
JONATHAN VOS POST
Jungle-floor bacteria devour helicopters after war;
ripped human corpses thaw, screaming, in battle zone
Smog-sucking moss evolves to grow on auto bumpers;
gas-tank tapeworm writhes: blind premium dreams
Heavy weaponry of corporate wars, intractable
ultimatum when lawyers subpoena their own DNA
Cockroaches skitter: dust of broken televisions;
lay phosphorescent eggs between commercials
Reunification pressures force abandonment of immortality;
death substitutes for taxes: final cost of doing business
Skinned headless lizard throbs, shoved into your chest:
replicant replaces your broken-once-too-often heart
Time & nucleotide
wait for no man
2300-2320
15 Sep 1992
Patenting genes seems to be common business practice in agriculture. Patented rice and grain seeds with special properties (like resistance to a specific herbicide) are sold all over the world already to Farmers more or less licensing the stuff. There are some problems with this aproach:
How can we be sure that the patented genes really came out of some laboratory, and were not found in some countries where people already knew about the specific properties of the stuff (maybe because they cultivated it over thousands of years). Some corporations are accused of doing just that with rice varieteys in 3rd world countries (where the farmers probably couldn't even pay the flight to USA, when dragged before a court there). We haven't even begun to catalog all species on earth, let alone their genetic diversifications, but maybe there should be a puplicly accessible database of genetic material from particularly successful or common crop sorts all over the world that are not yet patented, to be able to prove prior art.
Another problem is, that unlike music, films, books, software and whatnot life has it's own builtin copy-mechanism, in fact, once it's out it's sometimes hard to stop it from replicating or crossing borders. I remember a case, where a Farmer had to pay license fees, because grain from seeds his neighbour (who had planted patented stuff) blew on his fields and grew there. How could that man have prevented that, short of burning down his own corn? We already know to what ends the rights holders struggle for getting each and every use of IP paid led us in the case of copyrights. What will we see now? Genes with builtin DRM schemes (like if you don't spray your crop with a specific shortlived virus it won't survive the next month)?
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Every person, by the very definition of 'ownership', owns his own DNA and the rights to use it. The Declaration of Independence reaffirms this, as all men and women have a right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness: DNA is a matter of life.
Furthermore, the US constitution prohibits slavery as well: creating people for the purpose of using them in some capacity without their consent is the very definition of Generational Slavery.
Not that all this matters. The biotech industry will buy the republican party just as Enron and the rest of big oil has, and change such laws to allow them whatever experimental rights they want.
The issue comes about if somebody patents a cure to a disease or similar.
This, IMHO, is very bad. In fact, patenting a cure for a fatal disease should be considered corporate murder (they know that people will die if they don't get the cure, patenting it means they control it, and if they weren't intending to withhold it from some people and thus kill them, they wouldn't need that control)
Then they wouldn't do the research and we'd never find the cure? Nuh-uh, because not researching such a cure if you have the capability to would ALSO be corporate murder.
there are several things to note here.
the quid-quo-pro of the patent system is disclosure for _limited time_ monopoly. by offering patents, we incentive people to discover and reveal literally life-saving things about them in exchange for being able to solely exploit this knowledge for 20 years. 20 years later, anyone can exploit the knowledge.
it is unfortunate if strict licensing agreements prohibit some people from affording detection of breast cancer, but this must be balanced against the alternative that without the promise of patent protection, the knowledge underlying the screen might still be unknown.
prior art of the form "my cell contains this" is not relevant here. the patents most people are shooting are "composition of matter" patents, which are relevant to natural products that are purified or isolated from their natural state. in other words, public policy recognizes that finding a needle in a natural haystack and understanding the functional importance of the needle constitutes a genuine advance in the state of human knowledge. otherwise many things (industrial chemicals, drugs, etc.) which can be found in nature _if you know where to look_, would not be patentable.
finally, many of the early patents on genes were actually patents on cDNA, which is an image of the gene as cleaned up by the cell (think of it as an executable that has had strip run on it). these patents are neither considered very strong or very valuable, and companies (e.g. incyte) that pursued a patent heavy strategy are now struggling to find the value and are invariably moving towards more interesting achievements (aka advancing up the drug development chain). to some degree, the patent system is GIGO.
are there some harms associated with granting patent monopolies? yes. are there goods associated with granting patent monopolies? yes. the patent is a compromise.
The highly indignant researcher from Penn was using a patented research tool which was very expensive to invent and perfect.
See, this is what bugs me so much about scientific discussions on Slashdot- for every expert in the field, there's always one idiot who makes a forceful argument based on a complete lack of understanding.
Anyway, you need to read up on DNA testing, PCR, gene expression, genome analysis, and gene finding. I'm guessing the genetic test the Penn researcher was doing was for a defective form of a certain gene- could be just a single polymorphism. This could be done from a simple tissue sample, probably, and wouldn't require use of Myriad's "invention" or "perfection". Anyone can get the proper homologous sequences for detection made up with the right amount of money- my university has it's own center for this.
Secondly, gene finding is more a matter of hard work than of genius or innovation- hardly meeting the "non-obvious" requirement. There are many methods, but right now it could be as simple as this:
- run a gene-finding program against the raw sequence
- find matches to suspected genes in protein databases
and in some cases you can have an almost certain functional identification of the given gene this way- and you can do it all by computer. This isn't like some super-drug that took teams of researchers years to synthesize, it's a natural product that's relatively easy to find and characterize, with a huge probability of multiple independent discovery.
The real problem is that these genes aren't inventions at all- they are no more than discoveries, however much the biotech corps try to twist definitions. An invention might be something like a human-modified gene that when expressed yields a desireable product. But in this case the protein product would be the better target for a patent.
This is the real indignity- biotechs aren't coming up with useful products, they're just patenting genes like mad in the hope of coming up with a product later. In the case that someone else independently makes a product, they're besieged by lawyers. Myriad couldn't come up with a use for their patented gene, but they're willing to sue a publically-funded researcher to prevent her from performing a valuable medical service that doesn't even require their data. They're parasites, pure and simple, and the single largest reason why we need projects like the HGP. I think the public research centers should begin patenting every new gene and licensing it free of charge, just to keep companies like Myriad from screwing real scientists.