Patenting Life: Companies Seek to Own Biology
Can you believe that a company filed for a patent on a living species? The J. Craig Venter Institute created the first form of synthetic or “artificial life,” a bacterium named Mycoplasma laboratorium and filed in the US to own all rights to the life-form.
The bacteria could be released in the upper atmosphere, absorbing carbon dioxide in the battle against global warming. The process could also be used to create cures for life threatening illnesses. You can use your imagination as to the big bucks that would be behind one of those applications.
Yet problems arise when you try to apply patent law that was created during the industrial era. A patent can be filed when something novel or new is introduced to a product or invention. That’s fine and dandy when you have a device like the cordless telephone, but doesn’t apply so well with nuances like man-made microorganisms.
A company could very well file for patents for a range of lifeforms, successfully blocking innovations by future scientists. Imagine, every time someone wants to use one of these bacteria in a lab they’d have to obtain the proper permission. Anything that resulted as a breakthrough could be construed to be owned by the original patent holder.
With the halt to innovation aside, there are also broad moral implications. Today it’s ownership of a bacterial strain, tomorrow it could be a more complex organism. The snowball effect could be shocking. That’s why something needs to be done now to bring these laws into modernity, before it’s too late.
Image via electricsheep.org
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Krishna said
am March 18 2008 @ 5:39 pm
I totally agree. There is a stark difference between owning rights to a living organism and something that isn’t. It will be a bad day when something like this happens …
Krishna
Jerad Kaliher said
am March 18 2008 @ 8:34 pm
@Krishna, I’m far from a right-wing moralist yet something about this really bothers me to the core as well. Innovation would be stifled in biotech because companies would own entire organisms. That’s also a pretty big issue in my book.
Bob said
am March 29 2008 @ 3:56 pm
As far as whether this is right or wrong morally completely depends on your personal beliefs, but as far as the issue of stifling advancement goes I don’t see how patenting an organism would be any different than patenting any other innovation. Companies would find ways around the patent, develop a different organism, or simply wait until the fourteen years were up and the organism was moved to public domain. Not to mention that disallowing patents would remove most of the monetary benefits that lead to these sorts of innovations because honestly, why bother making the basic organism yourself, just wait till someone else spends billions of dollars on it, copy it, and adapt it for your own uses. Patents promote innovation. Saying that it inhibits innovation just shows you don’t understand capitalism and patent law.
C.A. Simmons said
am October 30 2008 @ 6:55 pm
Could you imagine the artificial life-form market competition?
Julian said
am August 31 2009 @ 1:25 pm
Unfortunately this has already been done.. these idiots (Venter) and many others have patents on genes from humans, mice etc. The worst part is that some of these genes hold the key to cures for diseases such as breast cancer (BRCA1 and BRCA 2 (google search)). The genes that could unlock and cure the world are being kept under secret by dirty, immoral, righteous greedy slime balls. A few bucks in their pockets is apparently worth pain, suffering and death. These ***holes need to go die in a hole. Or at least be struck with every disease they have prevented from being cured.