Jeremy Rifkin is at it again.
In June, Rifkin and biology professor Stuart Newman made the national news
when the US Patent Office rejected as unpatentable their proposal for
a human/animal hybrid species. The Patent Office ruled that allowing
any partially human organism to be patented would violate the 13th
amendment, which abolished slavery.
Rifkin, who generally opposes all
genetic engineering of organisms religiou grounds (his 1993 book, Algeny,
cited creationists in its attack on Darwinian evolution), plans to appeal
the decision and force the government to draw its regulations on the patentability
of life forms more clearly in the apparent hope the government will decide
to reject all patents on living organisms.
The obvious way out is for a court or the Patent Office to rule that it erred in its bizarre interpretation of the
13th amendment. Since a patent on an organism or a derivative
of that organism (such as a genetically engineered human insulin-producing
goat) does not grant anyone ownership of persons under U.S. law, the application
of the 13th amendment in this case was patently absurd and
represents a gross misunderstanding of the status of genetically engineering
animals with human genes. This is a widespread misunderstanding, however,
as the Internet is now filled with discussions about how corporations
could one day own human beings (this line of reasoning makes about as
much sense as claiming that the companies who make ultrasound equipment
have an ownership stake in the fetuses their equipment helps diagnose).
In fact, in contradiction to
the Patent Office’s rejection of Rifkin and Newman’s patent, the Patent
Office has already issued several patents for animals that contain human
genes or organs.
The danger, of course, is
that politicians will react out of the same ignorance and misunderstanding
as they rushed to act when the news broke about the cloning of Dolly the
sheep. Without patent protection, many of the next generation of medical
treatments that are already under development will be stymied and in many
cases killed outright since it will be incredibly difficult for companies
to recoup their development costs without such protections.
Rifkin himself is responsible for
a lot of the misunderstandings of cloning and genetic research that many
in the public have. Rifkin has a serious problem with reality — he convinced
numerous religious leaders to sign a petition in 1991 against genetic
engineering by sending out a letter claiming that a biotech company had
gained a patent for “an unaltered part of the human body.” In fact the
company in question, SyStemix, obtained a patent for a process of obtaining
a modified version of human bone marrow stem cells that may someday have
uses as a treatment for AIDS, cancer and other human diseases.