WHO owns your genes? The argument has raged for decades. As long ago as 1991 there was an outcry when the US National Institutes of Health attempted to patent partial sequences emerging from the early stages of the human genome project.
At the time, many patent lawyers believed that such attempts would be futile: they argued that genes are discoveries, not inventions, and so cannot be patented. How wrong they were. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued patents on genes and other DNA sequences covering up to 40 per cent of the human genome.
The argument justifying…
