“The U. S. patent code was never meant to cover your genes, your cells, your blood, or the marrow in your bones. But it does.”
August 9th, 2010

Via: Esquire:

Like, for example, the gene called BRCA1. There’s a chance you have that gene. There’s an even better chance your wife has it, or your sister or your mom, because that’s the gene for breast cancer. If you could test yourself for BRCA1 right now, or if you could test your wife or your sister or your mom, you probably would, right? Just to be on the safe side. But you can’t test yourself because you don’t know how, and your doctor can’t test you because he’s not allowed–at least, not without permission from the person who owns the gene. And that person isn’t you. It might be in your body, but it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to a company called Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. So if you want to know whether you have the gene for breast cancer, you’re going to have to call somebody for permission. Then you’re going to have to pay for the cost of the doctor’s visit, plus a $2,500 fee to Myriad Genetics just to access its gene, the gene inside your body. Those are the rules of the patent game. That’s what a patent means: exclusive access. And the last time somebody broke those rules, the last time somebody ran a test for BRCA1 without permission, Myriad Genetics went after them. And Myriad Genetics made them stop. And that was a university.

And that’s just BRCA1. There are about a thousand other human genes that have been patented. Some of them are in your body, and many of them are important, like the one for Alzheimer’s disease and the one for epilepsy and the one for brain cancer. If you happen to have one of those genes , it might interest you to know that researchers are paying to access them, too, sometimes millions of dollars just to continue the work of looking for a cure.

It’s not just genes , either. There’s a patent on the blood inside every human umbilical cord. So if, by chance, your newborn baby needs that blood, don’t expect to get it for free. There’s also a Swiss company called Novartis that has a patent on the stem cells in your American bone marrow. Don’t expect to access those cells if you ever need a transplant, either, unless you’re prepared to pay.

Some companies have patents on entire species of animals, like the species of mice and pigs that belong to DuPont. You can patent people, too, and not just John Moore. These days, you can get a patent on just about anybody; a patent issued in 1995 to the U. S. Department of Health covered the cell line of an unsuspecting member of the Hagahai tribe in Papua, New Guinea, whose resistance to certain diseases made him valuable to researchers. Other patents filed by the U. S. government at around the same time covered indigenous people from the Solomon Islands and from the Guaymi tribe in Panama.

As a matter of constitutional law, all of this is highly suspect. There’s never been a vote by Congress to approve the patenting of human or animal life, there’s never been an executive order by any president, and there’s never been a decision by the U. S. Supreme Court on the patenting of any animal larger than a microorganism. In fact, just twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t patent any of it: genes , cells, blood, marrow, even a clipped fingernail. Back then, the U. S. patent code looked a lot more like the code Thomas Jefferson wrote, the code that was designed to protect inventions–think cotton gins, whoopee cushions, Twinkies!–made on American soil. But that hasn’t slowed down the patent code, which not only applies to U. S. soil but now lays claim to ninety foreign countries, and even to “any object made, used, or sold in outer space.”

If you’re starting to get the impression that the U. S. patent laws have gotten out of hand, if you’re starting to wonder how they got that way, how they stretched so wide so quickly without any public debate or government approval, the first question you ought to ask yourself is why you never thought about it before. The answer, most likely, is that you didn’t know. You didn’t know because nobody knew. Nobody knew because nobody cared. Life went on, oblivious.

And that’s how it happened.