How It Came to Be- the Patenting of Living Organisms

I was curious. The US patent office did not always allow the patenting of living organisms. In fact  for over 200 years of American history it was illegal to patent life. How did it happen?

Then I learned that a scientist named Chakrabarty patented the first living organism , a genetically engineered microbe meant to consume oil in oil spills in 1980. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the landmark case Diamond v. Chakrabarty, approved the principle of patenting genetically engineered life forms. After that the floodgates opened and the race was on to exploit this new frontier.  A brand new colonial expansion. One more form of control over the world and it’s profit making potential. How did we go from there to where we are now?  What I found, and what you can read for yourself  in the attached document is that “the  biotechnology and pharmaceutical fields are sufficiently lucrative for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to overlook this fact.” That’s how it happened. It was lucrative to patent genes. A gene is a string of nucleotides that make up 20 amino acids that make up 90,000 proteins. The building blocks for all life.This translates to a lot of money for those who can control the rights to use and manipulate those genes.  Corporations have gotten around the patenting of life forms by breaking those life forms down into those string of nucleotides and disregarding the fact that those genes are the building blocks of plants, animals, and humans. Living things are no longer a whole being but strings of nucleotides to profit from. This seems to me like the final commodification of humans, and all other life on earth.  We have been broken down into nothing but profit making cells.  

And so, “Almost anything which is discovered or created by a human can be patented, as long as it is “useful” . Courts have interpreted the patent laws such that the laws of nature, basic physical phenomena, and completely abstract ideas may not be patented. A “composition of matter” is one of the things which is explicitly declared patentable. Since the canonical form of a gene is a string of nucleotides, which is a specific and unique composition of matter, genes have been declared patentable. New plant strains have also been judged patentable, except for plants found “in an uncultivated state”.”

The article is definately bent toward the unethicality of patenting genes, but gives both sides of the argument for and against gene patenting.   The article talks to medical students so it uses humans as examples, but these examples can also be applied to the harm in patenting plants or animals also. On of the main arguments on why gene patenting is harmful is this excerpt.

“A patent on a gene (or on anything else) gives the holder the exclusive right to say what may and may not be done with that gene, at least in the commercial arena. Whether selling copies of the DNA strand to academic researchers or putting it into a gene therapy vector, whoever holds the patent makes the rules for the 20 years until the patent expires. In a very real sense, the patent holder owns the gene. That same gene is found in every person on this planet (except for those who have a deleterious mutation, and who would very much like that patented normal copy). At least in the United States, it is specifically illegal to demand licensing fees from ordinary people just for having a patented gene in their bodies. However, the ownership over all “unnatural” uses of that gene remains. This raises an important ethical question: is it right to allow any entity to claim even partial ownership of any part of an intelligent being?”

 Slowly over the last 30 years or so the rules have been relaxed and changed. Look at the patent ruling that went from, patents on living things are not allowed to patents on everything. The guts have been taken out of many policies and laws to allow corporations to make more money, without respect for the cost, whether it be to the  cost of the environment, or to people. The ethical issues are allowed to fall by the way side one by one in pursuit of more money. The patenting of genes may be one of the last frontiers, colonized and  taken over by the industrial powers.  Once plants and animals have been broken down into the sum of their genes wholy owned by corporations, are humans next. In fact corporations already do own patents on human genes, for the purposes of medical research. But then how far will we as a society let that go?

This link will take you to one of my sources for this blog. It is  A Primer on Gene Patents

http://lcoble.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/genepatents.pdf

~ by Lorina Coble on February 9, 2008.