Patents for Pesos

If there is one word that I could use to describe Craig Venter’s life it would be “controversial”. A copious amount of the decisions he made seemed to be very questionable and left him in litigious altercations. These decisions ranged from vowing to complete the entire sequencing of the genome four years before the government funded Human Genome Project to making bad business arrangements that ultimately led him to being fired from the very company he founded. One of the most argued issues that developed from Venter’s work was the idea of the ability to patent the human genome, an opportunity that severely enticed a patent attorney named Robert Millman.

For the most part, Venter and Millman disagreed heavily on the concept of patenting the human genome. Venter was primarily about running a business based on open research. Findings would be shared with other researchers and the public. Millman saw himself living in “a patent attorney’s wet dream” (Shreeve 174). The gold mine of information and discovery that surrounded Celera and Millman encouraged him to obtain as many patents as possible and sort out the ownership later. His eyes were set on money, and he would try his hardest to achieve wealth. But Millman’s desire for such a paramount feat posed new questions involving business and science: can one really patent the human genome?

This has been a pressing issue ever since 1980, when a supreme court decision ruled in the favor of a microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty that “anything under the sun that is made by the hand of man” is patentable subject matter (Shreeve 228). From then on, various other cases have been brought to the Supreme Court involving patenting DNA sequencing information. Most recently though, the Supreme Court in 2013 published a ruling in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union that unanimously found that unmodified genes were products of nature and therefore are not patent eligible subject matter (NHGRI 2014). This means that the human genome is not available for patenting, but other synthesized genes could be.

I personally believe the human genome should not be able to be patented, although I do not fully understand all of the research and methods that are involved in the process of sequencing. This is one of the arguments posed by many in favor of the patent. How can Supreme Court judges make decisions on something they know little about? In the Genome War, it mentions a man named Arthur Caplan asking state legislatures if they knew where the human genome was located. One third said in the brain, another third said in the gonads, and the other were not sure (Shreeve 14). In the eyes of some, this goes to show many politicians are not properly informed enough to make the decision. But I believe you do not need to possess the full knowledge to make the decision. The human genome is a naturally occurring phenomenon that continues to amaze people, and there is still so much to find out about it. It is not man-made and therefore, a patent should not be permissible. New findings are being discovered about it, not invented. A patent is used for something original, and human DNA has been around since the existence of the human race.

Blog By: Josiah McFarland

References: 

http://www.genome.gov/19016590 - National Human Genome Research Institute

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and save the         World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Print.