This isn't quite culture related, but... I saw somewhere that there are trademarks of 20% of our genes at the USPTO.
My instinct is that this seems wrong, given that it's a patent of a discovery of something that occurs in nature, and that it could potentially harm the quality or price of various types of medical care or drugs. At the same time, it seems possible that banning genetic patents could cause pharmaceutical companies to decrease their investments in research. Does anyone here have thoughts on this? Does anyone know more about the economics? I did some Googling and I found a lot of conflicting info. Best, Jonathan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
