You don't own your own body... somebody else does

Bits of it, anyway.

"Treating DNA as a chemical, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued about 1,000 patents on human genes."

That quote was from this article, written back in the year 2000:

The Scientist : Will Genomics Spoil Gene Ownership?

As an avid reader, a constant on all of my wishlists of family and friends is the following:

A book by any author on any topic.

This has led to my reading of a wide variety of books that I wouldn't have bought for myself, but almost always prove interesting, sometimes fascinating, and occasionally thought provoking.

This past Christmas, Theresa got the latest Michael Crichton book "Next" for me. Always a fan, due to his outstanding ability to combine fact and fiction, it turned out to be all of the above.

I won't tell you anything about the book, other than its creating a desire in me to look up some things. The above article is the first thing that comes up when one Googles "gene ownership".

And it doesn't end there. This from an article out of Stanford University back in 1994:

"Operators of more than a dozen international agricultural research centers have assumed that the plant genes they collect and store belong to humanity in general. The governments of countries, however, are beginning to assert that they own living organisms collected within their boundaries ..."

Compromise needed on gene ownership to protect food supply

I don't know where all this is taking us. But I'm not really sure it's a direction in which I wish to be traveling. And, apparently, I'm not the only one confused and concerned about this:

French doctors puzzle over gene ownership