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Nearly Half the Patents on Marine Genes Belong To Just One Company (smithsonianmag.com)
A creature as majestic as a whale, you might think, should have no owner. Yet it turns out that certain snippets of the DNA that makes a sperm whale a sperm whale are actually the subjects of patents -- meaning that private entities have exclusive rights to their use for research and development. From a report: The same goes for countless other marine species. And new research shows that a single German chemical company owns 47 percent of patented marine gene sequences. A just-published paper in Science Advances finds that 862 separate species of marine life have genetic patents associated with them. "It's everything from microorganisms to fish species," says lead author Robert Blasiak, a conservation researcher at the University of Stockholm who was shocked to find out how many genetic sequences in the ocean were patented. "Even iconic species" -- like plankton, manta rays, and yes, sperm whales. Of some 13,000 genetic sequences targeted by patents, nearly half are the intellectual property of a company called Baden Aniline and Soda Factory (BASF).
So, basically China?
Actually, it's not a spin-off. It is IG Farben itself. When seven german chemical companies in the 1920ies decided to form a trust, they did it by signing over all shares of six of them to the seventh, and the holder of the shares got shares of the seventh in return. The seventh company in question was the BASF (which is Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik), which after that renamed itself in IG Farben.
That's precisely why genes can't be patented in the United States. In the US, one can't patent natural phenomenon, nor "the laws of nature" (the laws of physics etc) because those can only be *discovered*, not invented.
Btw the fact that "the laws of nature" aren't patentable is the bit of law that disinformation blogs use to trick their readers, and pretend that anything that can be described in mathematical terms isn't patentable. "The laws of nature" includes not just gravity, but also "the laws of mathematics". The liars make the
incorrect jump from "the laws of mathematics" to "anything that can be described in mathematical terms", saying "you can't patent math". That's not really true - you can't patent the laws of physics or math, so you can't patent gravity, but you can patent a new elevator design. An elevator USES gravity. You can't patent the associative law of addition, you can patent a cool new technique load balancing across a world-class network, which uses mathematical concepts in its implementation.