The inappropriate, the own and the other

Abstract

There was a time when life was protected from patenting, from appropriation. But now the business aristocracy - and its attachments - tell us that they have the right to patent life when it comes to "non-essentially biological procedures, such as taking a gene of one species and implanting it in the genome of another species," which, as even school children now know, is the most essentially biological process of a lifetime. This is how all existing species have been formed, which for this reason share their genetic material. Genes jump from one species to another as part of the mechanism of evolution, as seen by the American agronomist who called them jumping genes, an observation that earned him a Nobel Prize in Science many years later. But things go much further, species make symbiotic treatments. Dr. Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell) called for a moratorium on them to be mocked during the Cold War years: that the buttons should not be pressed until we knew something about some simple bug, such as the protozoa Myxotricha paradoxa, which digests cellulose in the gut of Australian termites, leaving the lignin they excrete as bricks of construction.