JOHN SULSTON, the director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, is a firm
believer that scientists and inventors should be able to protect the “novel
applications that are the products of their hard work and imagination”. By all
means, he says, let’s patent the drugs that are likely to result from the human
genetic alphabet, but not the letters themselves.
As he adds: “We don’t have patents on the letters of an alphabet used to
write books or the notes to compose music”
(New Scientist,1 April, p 46).
Patenting the sequences of human genes amounts to much the…
