Access to our own DNA

[David Johnson]

On Monday March 19 2001 05:58 pm, Jake Bowman wrote:

> Surely, of all the code that should be public, we
> should have "source" access to our own DNA?

The first time this gets into court it will be thrown out. In the meantime, 
the press is doing a wonderful job of confusing the public.

No one can patent your DNA. It is preexisting and obvious. Neither can they 
copyright it since they did not create it. They can *try*, and for a while 
they might be able to extort royalties from other genomics firms, but I would 
have a very hard time believing this would stand up in front of court.

What they can do is to patent and copyright *new* genomes and patterns of 
DNA. They can also patent a particular *expression* of the human genome, as 
with a database.

-- 
David Johnson
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