patenting life
John Moore was diagnosed with hairy-cell leukemia in 1976. Under directions from his doctor, Mr. Moore's spleen was removed. Among other things, Mr. Moore continued to visit his doctor for seven years following his diagnosis. During these visits, the doctor took tissue samples of bone marrow, skin aand sperm, which Mr. Moore assumed were necessary procedures to prevent the reoccurrence of cancer. After discovering that he had become patent #4,438,032, John Moore learned that the doctor was patenting unique chemicals from Mr. Moore's blood for a multi-million dollar contract. Moore sued the doctor for malpractice and property theft. The California Supreme court refused to recognize that Moore had property rights over his own body, however. The doctor argued that because Mr. Moore did not possess the ability to manipulate his own body tissues into a socially useful product, he could not claim a right of ownership to these tissues. One concession the court did make to Mr. Moore was the right to sue his doctor for a breach of fiduciary duty and lack of informed consent. This issue and others are on the forefront of a growing debate over the patenting of life. Should we
It slows the publication and sharing of important results, because once a result is reported publicly, it cannot be patented. " No one else can produce it or use it, even for medical or human welfare, without paying fees to the patent holders. Neither cloned sheep nor cloned humans will help us combat hunger, ill health or social inequality. It introduces secrecy when what we need is openness. Biotechnology offers extraordinary promise for solving many problems -- but not when it is being exploited by corporations looking for patent-protected superpro. The case went to the Supreme Court in 1980, which ruled 5 to 4 that such strains of bacteria qualified as inventions. Soon Harvard Medical School scientists patented a genetically modified mouse. There's no doubt about who owns Dolly, the sheep who made front-page news recently as the first mammal ever to be cloned. like John Moore tried to do in the above example be able to protect own our own bodies from being patented and thus owned by others? Where should we as a society draw the line when it comes to weighing the possible advances possible versus the dangerous applications this new science may render? What are our ethical and moral responsibilities when it comes to the inevitable ability to clone a human, design a baby, or just predict whether someone is predisposed at coming down with a fatal disease? This is such a relatively new issue where so many new and potential dangerous applications are discovered daily. The plant and animal species that support human life on Earth have evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Eli Lilly company owns the patent on the human insulin gene. Changed and new life-forms can now be owned by multinational corporations, generation after generation.
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Acceptance Essays
