I completely agree with this article. There is a very strange attitude that everything we need comes from business and therefore it should never be constrained from doing whatever it wants to do. Whether that is continuing to be inefficient and carbon intensive or patenting life forms for private profit.

We are told the pay off for us is "better" crops which would not be developed otherwise. With patented genetically modified crops this has not proved the case. One crop scientist said that these crops meant that whereas previously scientists, government and farmers worked together and shared information to deal with pests and diseases now that is all "commercial in confidence". This leads to disaster.

Also it is now estimated that 30% of human genes are now patented. With 2 genes implicated in breast cancer BRCA 1 and 2 patent restrictions means you have to get permission to research them and there is the ability to charge large sums of money for access to them. There has rightly been an outcry about this. However how many people know this is what is happening? The whole issue of patents needs to be reassessed from a public interest, not a private tax (which is the real effect of patents) point of view.

Succinctly put. I agree.
As I have said several times no one corp or cartel should be able to patent the means of nature (genes).
I object to commercial gatekeepers to life. "pay or die" principal.

I disagree with one point only.

"This is not about patenting and IP..."

Absolutely, it is about patenting and IP.

It is thanks to the fundamentally archaic and largely nonsensical patenting laws that these crimes are allowed to be called legal.

We are being led by the nose by the US, that well-known breeding patch for greedy lawyers and mind-blowingly expensive lawsuits, in allowing the definition of an "invention" to be subverted and trivialized in this manner.

The argument should be, quite simply, "you did not invent that".

The justification for that argument being that the gene sequence, by definition, existed prior to the process of naming it.

Logically, this should then fall squarely into the bucket called "prior art", and automatically disallow the patent.

It is utter madness that we allow our government to turn a blind eye to the practice, and its ramifications.

There's not much these days that would get me marching the streets of Canberra with a banner written in my own blood, but this is one that would.

Agree completely with the author and the comments so far. The social implications of gene patenting are serious.

Pericles...in your own blood! You can have some of mine as well. :)

What I find irritating is when people simplify issues to the point of irrelevance and then hold it up as an outrage.

IP law throughout the world has a few simple tenets, you cannot simply patent something that pre exits because you found it first.

What you can patent is the use of that "item" in a new or novel fashion.

Secondly, any patent document has to have a clear description of exactly the application that has been patented.

Thirdly any patent has a limited life span of between 10 and 30 years, after which the technology can be copied or reproduced with no license fees.

For example the GM crop that is "round up ready" employs pre existing genes combined into new plants. In 10 years or so, anyone else can copy this.

The potential benefits from this research is huge, and if there is no protection for the intellectual effort, there is no incentive for the major drug companies to spend the money to do it.

Everyone might bemoan the fact that drug companies had the sole licensing rights for the HIV drugs, what is forgotten is that these companies were the reason these drugs existed in the first place.

While the drug companies and others like Monsanto are vilified, one forgets that we cannot live without their innovation. By an over zealous banning of IP rights on the human genome, one might inadvertently kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Shadow Minister (Re: Monsanto et al "we cannot live without their innovation"). This is a nonsense statement. We used to have plant breeding programs in public hands, controlled by government agricultural departments, the result of which were accessible to all. The split decision in the Chakrabarty vs. Diamond case in the U.S supreme court in 1980 (?) spawned the entire biotech industry we have today. Now anything is fair fame for patenting: genes, genomes, mice, pigs, human cell lines, even the human genome.

A moral conflict exists in patenting of life forms for GM crops: On the one hand biotechs have to argue "uniqueness" to get a patent, yet argue "equivelence" to other foods to get regulatory approval - which one is it?

More to the point, biotechs have never created something "de novo" - they merely tinker with an existing natural structure (DNA) that has been part of the intellectual commons of mankind since time immemorial. Their patents implicitly incorporate into private control the very machinery of life - that is, the ability to self-replicate and to self-organise. This is not an invention, but rather hijacks millions of years of natural evolution. It's tantamount to a car manufacturer fitting a new rear-vision mirror and claiming a patent on the internal combusion engine. And even then, the analogy falls way short of displaying the enormity of the social, ethical and moral consequeneces of patents on life forms.

Most patents are so broad in their description that the scope is enourmous. Patents can be taken out on biological techniques that apply broadly to any living system. Monsanto's infamous patent for a pig was intended to extend not only to a particular breed of pig, but to all its progeny - irrespective if the pigs were genetically engineered or not. US biotech company Ricetec tried to take out a patent on basmati rice. Another for the neem tree of India. It was only public outcry that saw these patents rescinded.

With a stroke of a dubious legal pen, the entire natural world has been pressed into the service of private economic interests.