J. Craig Venter creates artificial life!

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Those are just different verbs. The real question I see is an economic one. I don't see word use as so central for an already artificial category.

Your statement is certainly nonsense, yes. Unless you'd like to suggest how it might be done?

Be careful. In some cases it is actually demonstrably impossible to identify a single individual corresponding to a DNA sequence.


I don't have a problem with patenting of specific recombinant organisms, as long as it's a whole organism at a time.


Most people don't have any unique portion of their genomes. All of your genome is guaranteed to be shared with your mother or your father, for example. I think that interpretation of "you own your own genome" makes it pretty meaningless.

There is a real distinction.

Patents are reserved for things that do something: designs of machines, or methods of making something. If it doesn't do something useful, it's not patentable.

Abstract knowledge is not useful in and of itself, and is therefore not patentable. It's only the application of that knowledge to some concrete problem that is legally patentable.

If you have someone's entire genetic sequence, that is a unique identifier for that individual. Even without trying to cross-reference it against people, you can find out a lot about someone just from their DNA sequence.


OK. How about specific recombinant plasmids? (the main factor in producing useful recombinant organisms)


Not even remotely true. Crossing over shuffles the genome around during meiosis, so even at birth you are a genetically unique individual, with some sequences that are found in neither of your parents. And of course we are not genetically static. Your cells do not all carry identical genomes.

Patents are reserved for things that have economic value. The reason is to sponsor the creation of this economic value by allowing it to remain private.

Inventions and discoveries can both have economic value, so the distinction doesn't necessarily make much sense. Particularly given what discovery we might be talking about. Some discoveries can be quite practical.

You can't find out anything about any specific person from the sequence without having not only that person's sequence, but also the added knowledge that that sequence came from that person. Knowing that "someone somewhere in the 6 billion people in the world has this sequence with lactose intolerance, 4 amylase repetitions, and a tendency towards diabetes" doesn't violate anyone's privacy, as long as you don't know which one of those 6 billion people it corresponds to.

And it's not always unique. Identical twins share identical genomes, for example.


Plasmids are not in and of themselves a mechanism to, say, produce a drug, the way recombinant bacteria are, so I think I'd prefer they not be patentable. I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, though.


If you define "part of it is found in one parent, and part in the other" as "not found in either", perhaps. I personally wouldn't define things that way.

If you do define things that way, I think it makes your intellectual property scheme rather inconsistent. For example, Google buys sequence A from me and sequence B from my wife, and combines them to do something useful for 5 years. Then my wife and have a kid who happens to have the same sequence combined in his genome. He owns it now? Suddenly Google can't do what they've been doing for the last 5 years?

That sound unworkable to me.


Except for transcription errors, my somatic cells do.

You can find more than that. You can trace their ethnic background with excellent precision, you could probably figure out their age when the sample was taken (once genomics advances a bit farther) and all sorts of other information. The only thing you don't have is a name, but given all the information in a genome you could pretty quickly narrow it down.


Well, the plasmids are really the key point. Given plasmids, creating recombinant bacteria is child's play. (I'm not exaggerating by saying that; I created recombinant bacteria in my high school biology class and it wasn't at all difficult)


Well, not quite. The genome is shuffled around in a manner such that each parents' gametes will contain novel sequences even before they combine.


For one, you are trying to interpret the notion in bizarre ways, if you'll notice the poll options are all very much simplified because I didn't feel like expounding that many specifics; each poll option is just the general gist. Second, it's not even my stance but just one of the poll options I provided.


Even that is not entirely true. Some of your immune cells do not carry the same diploid genome as the rest of your somatic cells.

You could certainly determine their race. Ethnic background would depend on what ethnic group you're thinking of; religious groups with significant conversion aren't genetically defined, for example. Age you could not tell from the sequence, though you could get some idea if you knew the telomere length.

That would still be far from a privacy issue, though. You could improve by a factor of 100 from 1 in 6,000,000,000 to 1 in 60,000,000, and you'd still be many orders of magnitude away from identifying an individual.


That still results in combinations of segments that are in one parent or the other.


I think that's the straightforward way to interpret the poll option. The consequences are bizarre only because idea in the poll option is not well thought out.

I don't believe I ever claimed that it was your stance. It is, however, something one often hears from people who don't understand the issues: "everyone should own their own genome". That's why it's worth pointing out how poorly thought out that position is.

It would be much closer than that, especially as genomics advances.


Again... not quite. The process of meiosis ensures that sexual reproduction creates genetically unique offspring. Gametes already are different genetically from the individual who produced them, and not just because they're haploid instead of diploid.


Well, I'll see if I can give a better explanation of that stance then:

People should "own" their own genome in that there would be no database (even anonymous) of human genomes, or at least there shouldn't be one you can't opt out of. They are not required to disclose their genetic sequence under any circumstances that they don't want to. If they have their genome sequenced for medical purposes, privacy laws would stipulate that that information would remain strictly confidential and be used for no purposes not explicitly authorized by the individual.

As far as I understand it, that is basically the thrust of the "people should own their own genomes" stance.

Sorry, but quite. Recombination doesn't create new sequences from scratch; it just recombines sequences that are already there in different orders. That's why it's called "recombination".


That's a perfectly reasonable position - but one that has absolutely nothing to do with intellectual property or, indeed, ownership of any sort.


Not the ones I've talked to.

Crossing over shuffles the genome in novel ways. That does result in sequences that did not exist before.

By your logic, there can never be any new sequence, because that's just the same As, Ts, Cs and Gs that are already there in different orders.


Sure it does. People would "own" their own genome in that they have the exclusive right to control what is done with it. Perhaps an imperfect analogy, but whatever.