The Gene Patenting Debate Rages On

Shervin Riahi writes, "There's an article in Salon on gene patenting that my genetics lab professor, Judith Tsipis (member of Brandeis University faculty), informed her class of. This is a topic I feel not many people know/care enough about; defend your rights! "

It's just ignorant

[|deity|]

This does not make me proud to be an american, hell it doesn't even make me proud to be a human. What will it take for all of this stupidity on the part of the patent office to stop? Maybe when the director's child gets sick and he/she realizes that the child might have been cured had the information needed been publicly avaliable.

Profit should never be put before the good of any human and definately not before the good of the whole human race. How can a discovered moloculer sequence possibly be patentable. This is a molocule that occurs naturally not one that is created in a lab. I hope that sometime in the near future we as a society decide that humanity is more important then profit.

How are other contries handling DNA patents? Maybe they'll all be brighter then the US and refuse to honour DNA patents as any truly civilized country should.

I would rather see every process possible on a computer be patented then on single gene of any living creature not created in a lab. And since none have yet been created I don't want to see any gene patented.

America sucks I want to move to mars.

it's terrible

[cowscows]

All the arguments over amazon and software patents and such can't even compare to this. How can anyone seriously expect a patent on a found genetic sequence? This goes way beyond commercial unfairness.

These scientists going are trying to patent sequences they've been able to read, but don't understand. It's like a wrote a program that takes a dictionary, and groups all of the words in it into every possible order. Then I can copyright all of the results I get. This would make it impossible for anyone else to write, for fear of violating my copyright. Only for the genetic sequences, there isn't even a written program writing out the material, it's already there.

The people applying for these patents can't possibly expect us to believe they're motivated by anything except greed. They're patenting more stuff than they can possibly ever actually fully study and understand on their own. Why isn't a bigger deal being made of this?

It isn't good...

[Irbis]

Well, just imagine someone trying to patent his skull fracture just because "it helped to improve healing techniques"...

Patents = Cash cow, nothing else

[Whoozit]

This article and the heated debates regarding software and "business model" patents lead to one conclusion: The Patent Office has gone mad!

Mad as in greedy for money, that is. As was pointed out in other articles as well as this one, the Patent Office makes its money from the number of patents it puts out - they aren't interested in rejecting such applications. Even though applications for genes and such have more substance than, say, Amazon's 1-Click patent, that is not to say that they should be patentable.

We must first think of the consequences of such patents, and compare that to the desired result. Patents should encourage innovation and development - in this case, in new cures, new tests, and new knowledge; i.e. they should reward those who bring such new knowledge to the public. But from this article, it seems that patents are being used to steal the credit and any profit from the true researchers and put it in the hands of large corporations, as well as deny the use of the research to the public at large.

Clearly, this is not a desired result, and serves to hinder research rather than encourage it. When companies with a lot of money and clever lawyers start patenting genes that they do not even know the function or purpose of, and then as soon as somebody figures it out, to claim credit for it - that is clearly a blatant abuse of the system and must be stopped.

There might be some validity to filing and granting patents once something USEFUL is found. However, considering that often this research is conducted with samples freely donated from patients (i.e. the public), and public funds, should the fruits of these not be released to the public?

This does not even consider the moral and ethical concerns with restricting such research from the public once it is available, simply because a company that had some small investment in the research can make more money that way. We are talking about things that affect people's survival and quality of life, something we hold above all else. Should we not perhaps have some special laws dealing with this?

Perhaps so, but we probably will not. It is unfortunate that in our society, the bottom line is valued over even human life, at least by those with any real power.

*A PROPOSAL*

[ATKeiper]

This discussion is quite similar to another thread posted today about the Human Genome Project. In my post on that other thread (click here [slashdot.org]) I propose that a new category of patent be created, so researchers can have control over (and profit from) their data but only for a very limited time. That way, they can deservedly benefit financially from their investment of time and money (an incredible contribution to genomic research) while researchers' desire to have all genomic research freely available will only be put off briefly.

Incidentally, if you are interested in reading other articles about the genome patent controversy, we have a collection on our Biotechnology page [tecsoc.org].

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society [tecsoc.org]