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ya  Mother Nature owns those.
don't smurf with Mother Nature.

Another thing I would like to see reviewed is the practice of going into indigenous tribes and taking natural remedies they have been using for centuries and patenting them in the USA.

JakeTheTall wrote:

Pariah wrote:

I absolutely believe that such patents on discoveries of naturally occurring things should not be patentable

So really you're saying "lets remove the incentives to a company to go through the expensive FDA trails to bring something to market that will immediately be sold by all other companies."

Big Pharma has some bad habits, but often there's a legitimate reason for why laws exist.

Yeah, how about adding the rest of his statement

Perhaps a very narrowly defined treatment based on genes

The question is: Do we want the genome encumbered with patents to an extent that it has a chilling effect on future research?
The things is that a patent is not a property right. It is a limited monopoly that exists only to provide incentive for advancement in the arts. So a patent that would slow advancement is expressly unconstitutional.
The founders felt strongly about this and that's why they wrote it in to the Constitution.

I thought we had already resolved this crap, and the outcome was that actual genetic sequences could NOT be patented, but tests that show the presence or absence could?

Seriously, the early days of genomics involved people pulling sequences off of printers as fast as the popped out, and running to the PTO. Most, if not all, of these gene patents were thrown out. However, specific tests were allowed, and THAT is what is irritating people.

The incentive to find key parts of the genome would be the ability to patent specific uses for those parts, not any uses for those parts simply by virtue of being the first to label them.

I don't know enough about the technology, biology, and where the valuable information on treatments resides (i.e. finding the location in genome, or creating the treatment) to intelligently comment.

I'd better mail a sperm sample to the U.S. Patent Office as soon as possible!

Patents are only as powerful as tthe willingness to defend them. This is just positioning for the real showdown which will be the imarketing between biotech companies and big pharma. It's mostly just a public manifestation their internal battles over share. The actual work being done now, and projected, will go on regardless and I doubt the outside consumer will notice much, directly.