Heritage of Humanity: Sulston's views on DNA patenting

December 13, 2002 1:08 AM

Heritage of humanity This month's Monde Diplomatique features an essay by one of the 2002 Nobel Prize winners in Physiology and Medicine, John Sulston. Sulston "writes about his battle to make the entire sequence of the genome public despite all the commercial attempts to patent it". His basic point is that: "If we wish to move forward with [Human Genome Sequencing], which will undoubtedly translate into medical advances, the basic data must be freely available for everyone to interpret, change and share, as in the open-source software movement." The public human genome database Sulston refers to, can be found on the Sanger Institute's website.
posted by talos (2 comments total)

Sanger mentions the whole BRCA gene controversy in this piece, which we previously discussed here.
posted by talos at 1:31 AM on December 13, 2002

Hey! Keep your grubby hands off my genome! oh shit! I've been patented
posted by troutfishing at 8:01 AM on December 13, 2002