On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:
- Biotechnology patents are especially troubling. On the one hand one can patent a gene sequence discovered to be vaguely related to, say, breast cancer. On the other hand that gene sequence is usually derived from some volunteer's dna, but that person has no rights to the resulting value of the patent! Worse still, claims in biotech are very vague and broad simply because biotech is an emerging science. I'd bet most of you haven't heard that proteomics seems to becoming more important than genomics over the last six months...does this mean a gene sequence, including all of the proteins it interacts with, are covered by the original patent even though proteomics was unknown even two years ago??
I wonder if it would be worth filing a 'blocking patent' on your own genome and all its applications, just to prevent some other bozo from patenting it. Ray