Who owns you?

A genuine invention should get all the protections it can, and if a large corporation happens to be that inventor then good on it and may it protect its interests with all its might. The great thing about patents is they protect the little guys as well as the big guys.

But a patent should not apply to a discovery. Imagine the world if all the past discoveries in the natural world were owned by a company rather than just being part of the human knowledge bank.

These biotech companies did not INVENT the genes they fight so hard to patent. They may have DISCOVERED them and deserve the due rewards, but they should not be able to patent them.

In Australia we’ve already had many gene patents, and there’s already been controversy concerning the breast cancer gene.

The Australian company which has the gene licence here “gifted” the intellectual property rights to BRCA1 and 2 to a couple of research institutions (including a specialist cancer research institution) and didn’t charge them royalties. That was nice of them.

But then a couple of years later wrote to the institutions threatening legal action and told them to stop testing for the genes in at-risk women.

Public outcry nipped all that in the bud, thank goodness.

There are some serious ethical issues which must be dealt with if we are to continue patenting genes, including the ownership of that genetic material when it occurs inside or outside the human body and the voluntary donation of tissue rather than any form of tissue harvesting to secure genetic material.

Informed consent is crucial for people who may have tissue collected, and I do mean INFORMED. Fully and completely so there is no grey area.

So think of all the genes that make you who you are.

Now imagine that one of those genes has been isolated by a biotech company and is then used to develop a crucial test or treatment for a particular disease or illness.

They patent that gene.