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Senate push to ban gene patents
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| A BID to halt the controversial patenting of human genes will be launched
| before a Senate committee next week, when experts will argue that the
| practice is akin to patenting the moon and is strangling vital research.
|
| About 20 per cent of human genes are already patented in the US. The issue
| sparked alarm in Australia last year when a Melbourne-based company that
| owned rights to a gene mutation that causes breast cancer ordered all other
| laboratories to stop performing the $2100 test.
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25865117-30417,00.html
Recent:
Patenting the Barcode of Life
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| DNA barcoding is such a powerful idea that the parasites have moved in, and
| started trying to *patent* bits of the idea:
|
|
| Systematic and phylogenetics, indeed much of evolutionary science, has
| long and great tradition of making resources and knowledge freely
| available to other resources. Instead of cash, all an author asks for is
| a citation or a credit. Therefore, it sounded incredulous to me that one
| researcher was trying to patent a DNA barcode snippet for a plant gene
| that was being worked on over several years by a large group of
| researchers.
|
|
| It's a classic situation: not only are scientific techniques being patented,
| they are techniques that are well established and have been used for years -
| something that is explicitly excluded even in the most deranged patent
| regimes. And people say the system is working just fine...
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http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/08/patenting-barcode-of-life.html
Cost of Decoding a Genome Is Lowered
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| Dr. Quake calculates that the most recently sequenced human genome cost
| $250,000 to decode, and that his machine brings the cost to less than a fifth
| of that.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11gene.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Poverty Kills
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| Bangladesh, 1974. Food per person was at an all-time high â it was a peak
| year in rice output and availability. It was also a peak year for starvation.
| 100,000 people starved to death, their skin cracking and their tissues
| breaking down. They were unable even to focus their eyes as the world watched
| on TV. Another million and a half died from starvationâs secondary effects.
| Another half-a-million died after the famine was over because their bodies
| had been made so weak. There was plenty of food to feed them. They starved
| because they were too poor to afford it.
|
| [...]
|
| Mortality resolves a number of long-standing technical debates about the
| right way to measure poverty. In the US we calculate poverty by having
| experts at the Department of Agriculture figure out the cheapest products on
| sale in America that could meet minimal nutritional requirements. They add up
| how much they cost and multiply by three. People with less than that are
| defined as poor. Can the poor really follow that minimal diet in practice?
| How do you even decide what minimal nutritional requirements are? Why three?
| The answer is simple: just count deaths instead.
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http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/povertykills
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