First patent application for a method of creating synthetic life forms

History gets made in the most bizarre places. If you think of creating new life as a form of bureaucracy, a mere mechanical process, the whole idea truly sucks. Yet, even World War Two had an administrative Rube Goldberg element attached to it.

Archives around the world are full of documented versions of wars, disasters, revolutions, the ennui of eternity. Those familiar with the patent issues in biology will remember with a sigh the starry eyed altruistic efforts to patent diseases, various parts of the human genome, virtually anything which could fit onto an application. Patents, world wide, got a lot more scrutiny than they’d ever had, and the process is slowly starting to tighten. Pity of it is that the law has had no chance to really catch up. Property rights are being created faster than anyone knows how to deal with them. However- in this case they also ascribe property rights to forms of life. The two best know previous forms of that were called agriculture and slavery. What are the rights, when does life have its own rights because it is a form of life? If someone clones a human being, we will have the first ever illegal human being. Someone might even “own” that person in the form of intellectual property. There are no legal rights for cloned people, because they’re not supposed to exist. The non-human version raises the same points. If we’re able to create a legal situation where an organism becomes a “tool”, how much can you blur those definitions, when applied to people or human tissues? Better yet, try for a situation where there are no defined rights, and let commerce take its course. Sounds idyllic. People could wind up with subscriptions to their own medical procedures, at least. If you’re using a patented technology to live, you may be in a position to rent a kidney, or pancreas-pool. If you’re living a neurologically computer-assisted life, you might have to deal with changing servers every so often. No rights = no guarantees. I’m not about to accuse the guys in this article making their patent application of being the sort of insane suits who create these situations. Obviously, they aren’t. What bothers me is that yet another income stream has opened up for the maniacs. Read unusualsuspect’s article in conjunction with this and the source. “See pattern, loathe pattern.”