Today we have an article about the mingling of Business and Science. Honestly, for the first time in my life, reading an article about Science has driven me to nausea. The article, by Wil Hylton, describes the, ahem, situation we have today concerning patents on genetic material and some of the history on how we got here. Take home message: your DNA is legally owned by a collection of bodies - some governmental, some academic, some for profit. Warning: his writing style seems to aim to make people irate, but he redeems himself with a poignant moment at the end. It is not hard to reach the end, thoroughly fascinating from start to finish.
One of his main themes is the public's awareness, or lack thereof, of what is happening. Hylton stresses that having genes and such be patented is technically equivalent to making our knowledge of DNA public, but does not really address why his article is important, namely, that it is informing us of how much of our body legally belongs to somebody else. How then are we supposed to find out about important, game-changing discoveries in Biotechnology?Blogs? Newspapers? Nobody reads through patents for fun, perhaps someone should publish a review on genetic patents.
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