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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).
How can you patent something you didn't create? Copy-pasted genetic sequences are just copy-pasted prior art libraries!
CAPTCHA: "Lordship"
Why am I reminded of this:
The Right to Read by Richard Stallman
This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
Yeah, but IG-Farben was taken apart 1950 by the West Allies: that's what I meant by "spin off". OTOH you're right in that BASF is one of the bigger turds coming out of that -- the other is Bayer, which now has Evil Monsanto embedded in its cytoplasma).
To note that they got an especially friendly treatment after the war, due to their strong ties to Exxon (!) and DuPont.
Spawn of the devil.