e Bill Gates take notice. Celera has already applied for patents on 6,500 genome sequences it thinks will prove medically profitable (Dyer 2). Celera contends it makes its discoveries available on its Web Site, but it already has charged large pharmaceutical companies $5 million apiece for access to its discovered sequences (Ridley 1).
From a joint announcement issued by Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton, advocating scientists share their human genome sequence discoveries, to outcry from the halls of academia, law and religion, many are opposed to anyone being able to own the basic sequence of the human genome. Some argue it is illegal, though the U.S. Patent Office has already issued three patents to researchers on decoded segments of human DNA and is considering more than 10,000 other patents pending (Dyer 2). Jeremy Rifkin, of the Washington-based Foundation for Economic Trends, argues this is illegal “Under U.S. law discoveries in nature are not inventions. The U.S. Patent Office has been violating its statute” (Dyer 2). Yet, the Supreme Court seemed to disagree with the U.S. Patent Office when it rejected General Electric microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty’s patent for a microbe that could clean up oil spills. Denied by the Patent Office, Chakrabarty took his argument to the Supreme Court, and the Court agreed. As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote “The relevant distinction [is] not between living and inanimate things, but that microbes such as the one Chakrabarty identified are human-made inventions” (As Corporations 1). However, this decision making a distinction between naturally occurring life and bio-engineered life might not cover the human genome patents because the human genome certainly is a natural process.
Despite the legal issues, there are also economic and moral ones. Some fear that medical progress, genetic research and other benefits of this discovery will be foreg...