Greed has perverted true meaning of 'patent'
Last fall, the journal Science reported that one-fifth of known human genes have been patented, some as many as 20 times. This surprising result highlights the fact that in America, private entities can now assert ownership over natural phenomena. Even our own genetic constitution is up for grabs.
Genetically, humans vary only slightly. Our genome is a palimpsest reflecting millions of years of speciation and evolution: a sequence of 3 billion nucleotides, 99.9 percent of which is common to all of us. But this shared genomic inheritance is increasingly sequestered by private...
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