Who owns my body?

There were some biotech companies in America that were trying to. I hope they didn’t succed but I never doid see a follow up story to the article about it.

Obviously they shouldn’t be patentable, genes are already in nature, so ‘discovering them;’ is just a case of looking at something.

The same cheeky bastard Americans also tried to patent a whole bunch of seed type which were from the international seed bankbecause no-one had tried before. I think initially they suceeded but there was a bit of an uproar. I also hope they sorted that one out.

sedm1000 stated:

I don’t think they should be patentable. For the reason that you must patent them according to a certain time and country you happen to be living in. This means that you will be in the heart of the beast. Even today patents don’t work as they were intended, courts are filled with law suits about patent infringements and other copyright violations. I do believe that we should have rights to our own specific genetic code and no I don’t believe that my nor anyone elses genetic code belongs to any society, nor should it. I think your questions are a little ahead of their time. But it’s good to have an open mind about such things, I think your questions will be front page newspaper articles in about the next 30-50 years. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

What’s your take?

Its actually a very current (almost old) question in the scientific literature, but yes I think it will crop up time and again for the forseeable future.

Worldwide patents circumvent the first problem.

Thequestion of invention is generally central - can you claim to have “invented” your genes? In general this is not true, as most variations of a gene will occur throughout a population, so being unique is unlikely, but in the case of specific modification it is already legal to patent genes (i.e. you make a unique modification to a gene). Patents provide motivation for Biotech companies as they protect products/profit, and some have already bought up large chunks of “unknown” genes just to buy themselves time to screen for potentially useful targets.

I agree that products should/must be protected to encourage investment by the Biotech industry, but the regulation specifying what constitutes the product must be corrected. There has been a case of a Agrobiotech firm suing a farmer becaue their seeds contaminated and crossbred with his crop - providing his plants with a beneficial gene for free. Steps must be taken to prevent transfer, and liability for failure to control gene dispersion must lie with the company, not the users (or their hapless neighbours).

There is an argument for society, or a population, owning versions of genes specific to them, but how you disperse such property rights is too complicated really to think about (not all members might have this version of the gene).I feel it safer to call the “invention” argument and simply prevent patenting of natural gene variants - but genetic engineering with synthetic genes (i.e. invented) might muddy the waters on this issue to. It might be the case that you (and maybe your descendants) pay royalties for having added a particular gene to your genetic make-up.

Certainly a good time to get into patent law.

Forgets to log in ^^^^^

Personally I think Biotech should only be allowed to patent the process of modification, but never the resulting genes. Also nature, once in a while has the possibility of producing this mutation. As for ownership of the body. No one can own it, as it’s not property. So to talk about the body in terms of ownership is actually incorrect and isn’t applicable. This is because of human rights, and what is deemed morally correct.

I can’t remember where I read this, but it was about gene modification. It was talking about how Mother Nature has spent billions of years seeing what works best. And only using slow mutations to make sure that any modification doesn’t have any long-term side affects, or is weaker then the current version. Meaning a plant might give more fruit yet needs more water. Short term the climate is very damp and wet, but after a couple of decades the weather becomes much warmer so the plant dies. Now if the only version of the plant is the modified we have lost a species. Also using a Chaos model for the ecosystem any small change will ultimately have large knock on effects over longer periods.

I read a story in one of my Sociology books awhile back describing how a small African tribe of about 300 people in the early 1920-30’s became an experiment to a group of Sociologists. The tribe’s main food source was Ox and the region was quite arid. So there were never enough oxen to allow the tribes numbers to grow beyond the 300 mark. So the nice sociologist taught the tribe how to cultivate livestock. This worked great, with in about 10 years the numbers had increased to around 400 people, as less of the tribe where dieing of starvation. Still more years past, but now the tribe was down to about 100. While short-term the increased number of oxen had allowed the population to grow, the food source of the oxen’s had stayed the same. Because of this the increased number of oxen had eaten almost their entire food source and used up most of their water reserves. So this source was unable to support the larger number of oxen the tribe needed. Once the oxen food source was depleted only a very small number of oxen survived. This had the same knock-on effect with the tribe who’s numbers also dropped rapidly.

While it’s different to gene’s it could have the same longer-term affect, as these scientist really don’t know what there doing. Yes we can change the gene, but in 100 years time we don’t know what type of affect it will have on the world.

Power becomes dangerous when we know a how to do something, yet don’t understand what we are actually doing.

Some of the modification process is so basic that a patent on it would cover half the field of genetic modification. If the modification may have a natural counterpart, then the question arises whether you have simply tweaked the system - and so do not really deserve patent rights. Patenting of techniques seems more acceptable though, especially as it is easy to prove the originality of the idea.

Not quite sure what you are talking about here, sounds like a corruption of a couple of ideas. I think that it is worth remembering that the mutation event occurs in a single individual, and that this will be spread amongst the population by competition and interbreeding. It is unlikely that the population will become homogenous to the extent that all individuals carry the mutant gene, and so there should be some survivors if the selection pressure changes to act against it. Evolution has no foresight, and so cannot predict the best combination of genes for future circumstances - and so often comes to a dead-end.

I think it is unfair to say that scientists do not know what they are doing. This is very much a media manipulated portrayl of science, because the context of research is rarely published - and hence scientists look to have been “mistaken” when contradictory work is revealed. The science of GM is 20+ years old, and well honed. There are certainly things that are unknown and mistakes will be made, but equally many good GM products are on the market at the moment. To ask scientists to predict the future is a little unfair given that Mother Nature cant do it either, but the technology that makes genetic modification possible also offers the best hope for a response to any catastrophe that awaits us in the future.

I have to side with pax Viate here, scientists don’t know what they’re doing at all. Look to begin with with the first cloned humans. Whether the story was true or not, we look at the first cloned sheep. It is suffering & aging faster than it should, all in all it’s been shown that the process of cloning doesn’t seem to be stable. And yet scientists are trying to produce a human clone (or apparantly have) which will suffer greatly because the process is nowhere near perfected, it’s just a ‘race’.

Also take a look at recent reports about GM crops. Mexico has found that many of it’s fields, I think the figure was 80%, near the US border had been infected by GM strains that were being tested on the other side of the border. Also in England weeds near GM trial fields have, without a doubt, been shown to have picked up the genetic material from the trials, the super weeds that you might call the “media manipulated” myth is not a myth at all, it’s really happening. It’s also easily demonstrated that nearby fields of similar crops have been cross pollinated by accident (as you already said) and then have the cheek to call it theft. They’ve opened the flood gates without even thinking of the consequences.

The truth is we don’t need those crops at the moment the EU has a masssive stockpile of rotting food and pays farmers to keep land fallow (and also pays farmers to keep sea fallow cause they’re so fing stupid ).

It is also a widely reported truth that terminator crops, which become infertile after the initial germination, are a threat to 3rd world countries who at the moment rely heavily on charitable donations of excess seed produced from 1st world farms. If there is no spare seed, because it is all of the terminator variety, they will have to buy their seed from the GM companies, which they cannot afford to do.

But it is true when we make large scale modifications with the express purpose of making it much better than its predeccesors. Also the modification would be introduced whole scale with the older breed being in a minority almost immediatly. That, I think, was Pax’s point. If selection pressure is such that the new gene is much more powerful it will wipe out the old gene rapidly. That’s why there are no old versions of humans, cats, dogs, etc. around. It’s only the particularly hardy or those species which haven’t had their ‘niche’ threatened that we still see today. And good businessman will want a GM crop that is fantastic when it has a diouble pairing of the gene, but shit when it has a cross breed, otherwise their work could be ripped off by cross breeding, a farmer would just sow his field 50/50 and then next year his crops (assuming they were non-terminator, as if they were Pax Vitae’s point would be doubly relevant) would, on average be roughly 75% strong and continue upwards due to selection processes, so he’d only have to buy half of what the GM seed seller wanted him to for all the benefit. We could even imagine a patient farmer buying only a few seeds and within acouple of years having enough to plant all his fields.

The point is that “Mother Nature” or genetic mutation as the rest of us know it, is a gradual process where large scale changes with rampant effects tend not to happen very rapidly allowing impact to be measured as well as have to rest of the ecosystem adjust to small changes as they happen. A rapid change means that unforseen circumstances can occur and the balance of nature can be rapidly altered to devastating effect. It is comparable to adding a new species to an unadapted ecosystem, like rabbits to Australia, or those Japenese algae (or some water plant) to American waterways. The damage done to the unadapted ecosystems was massive.

True, but nature naturally diversifies the gene pool to increase the possibility of a strong mutation developing. The point I meant to make was by specializing and adapting the gene to let say one environment. If the environment then changes the new gene will not have the diversity needed to adapt. With gene modification we can remove the balance needed for long-term survival by specialising a specific area of the gene, while the entire gene has already been calibrated by nature over the many millennia using the survival of the fittest maxim. We are thinking about short-term gain, and look upon this new strand of gene as a disposable commodity to be used while profitable, then develop a new strain when required. Some people call this in economics the ‘Disposable Razor Blade’ approach, meaning instead of sharpening a blade we just throw it away and buy a new one.

True, though I did say decades it was only for the example. In reality it would take centuries or even millennia. But it’s the long-term effects of change that can’t be seen. Currently the scales of nature have been balanced only by the survival of the fittest. Now a creature capable of changing the scales has developed, by the very thing with which we are now playing with. And I do mean Playing with! You say, “I think it is unfair to say that scientists do not know what they are doing.” That’s fine, but scientists theorize and then try out their theories. They only know that their educated guess was right, but it’s still just a guess. It’s one thing to know how to change a gene it’s another to know the consequence of that change in the distant future. I know you’ve said nature doesn’t know either, but the rule it uses has been very good so far. I’m not against gene modification. I think it’s dangerous when humanity gets so caught up by the belief it knows everything. All we know is just enough to be dangerous!

What is a “strong” mutation? A gene pool diversifies through silent/passive mutation (i.e. those that do not alter phenotype). A specific beneficial mutation will alter phenotype for the better, but it is just as random an occurence as a passive one. There is no real plan - as I said, nature has no foresight.

Apart from the argument that humans are natural entities, and so this is still natural selection, I dont really see that there is a difference between what humans choose and how nature evolves. There are countless natural examples of the situation you hypothesise - photosynthesis for one (it was evolved in an oxygen free environment, and is poisoned by excess oxygen).

I agree arrogance in science leads to mistakes, but the testing that goes on before the products are released is extensive. Commercial greed is a greater danger to good science in suppressing negative test results.

‘Strong’, I would say is any mutation that will help continued survival. I know this requires hindsight. But it could only be classified as strong, after it has been seen to be of benefit in surviving.

While like you’ve said nature’s way is passive, gene modification is not. Yes, nature deliberately diversifies to lessen the risk of extinction, while humanity wants to specialize. An example: Modified food. Food is a drug, fuel, and chemical reaction. If you change the chemical makeup of the food it will affect the digestion process that turns food into energy, and over time it will also change the people who eat it. We’ll automatically react to the changes in the food. Some biologists / anthropologists say that it was the change in our ancestors food source that eventually led to our bigger brains. So in eating modified food will also be indirectly modifying ourselves. The affect is unknown both to use and nature, yet like Matt said nature uses slow mutation to lessen risk. So it would be the side affect I’d worry about, but then again I’ll be long dead before any of this really has a change to take on hold on the species.

I don’t know enough biology to make a real life example. But I would wonder if humanities vanity would lead to specialisation of the “beatification” gene. Then over time and much procreation we become inbred and have unseen side affects like personality disorders or other mental problems. Again this is all hypothetical, and I don’t really have the first clue as to what I’m talking about, but that has never stopped me in the past or now. But it would be this type of unforeseen scenario, were we think we are only modifying a small thing, but it has major knock on effects later.

I didn`t like to say, but there is no real basis for “strong” and “weak” mutation in genetics. Any mutation might switch from “passive” to “strong” depending on the context you discuss it in. Equally, one might argue that diversity is a beneficial consequence, not design implement of spontaneous mutation (depends on your orign of life theory;)). There are certainly bottlenecks in species evolution that show wide population diversity is not maintained by selection, but is a consequence of reduced (weaker) selective pressures. To say that synthetic genes are less open to adaptation that natural ones will probably be false for many years to come. The strategy for creating synthetic genes is simply to mix and match modules from natural ones - analagous to the natural process again.

Organisms do adapt to their environment (e.g. what they eat). I dont see this as a specific problem - again it is doom-mongering a little, that something very unlikely “could still” happen.

Sorry sedm1000 but I’m not really sure what you’re arguing in that prevous post, could you clarify it a bit please.

Just pointing out that what had been previously said was not strictly accurate;), and so might invalidate the argument that it was cited to support.

I think our genes belong to us, god and our parents. Why should they belong to our society (unless you mean the society of Earth as a whole) when people are liable to move countries? You shouldn’t be able to pantent genes as they are only able to be reproduced under very specific circumstances.

Personally, I don’t think anything should belong to anyone. Why is it alright for a Chinese person to be in one geographical location but not in another one? Why is it that only certain people can afford to eat certain foods such as mangos or caviar? The land and the bounties of the land are free to all humanity, yet they are taken over by greedy countries and greedy businessman who control and sell what is not theirs to lord over and give away.

Well technically speaking they’re taken by all those people who have too many children, which at the state where in at the moment is any. If we wern’t overpopulated resources wouldn’t be lacking (but the i suppose labour would be!)

With the wide-spread development of RFID’s, soon old Uncle Sam may begin to own your body.

Sorry thats not too germane to where this thread was going

What is the US Draft if not the repossession of the Property of The United States of America to use as it believes fit.

Pax Vitae

Again this is all hypothetical, and I don’t really have the first clue as to what I’m talking about, but that has never stopped me in the past or now.

This is lovely, made me laugh so much!