Whose genes are these anyhow?

The March 2 Science Friday had a segment on gene patents. It wasn't about GM crops, but medical research, yet I found some of the ideas really helpful.

The expert witness, as it were, was Robin Feldman of Stanford Law School. One of the things she pointed out was that patent law developed to deal with mechanical inventions, not parts of complex living systems. So the law may appear to work for those still caught up in a reductionist approach to science, and its lucrative applications.

But this model for the law doesn't work whether the patented genes be medical or agricultural in their use. There are too many interactions, too many feedback loops, too many ripples.

Feldman also discussed a case where a patent was challenged for purposes of pure science, for university experiments. The court disallowed the use, asserting that a university is, in effect, a business. Other countries have experimental use exceptions, but that doesn't seem to be the case for patented genes in the U.S.

If the law is this slow to change, no wonder most mindsets are, too. We continue to see components of living things as machines (actually, "intelligent design" is committed to this - but that's another whole subject!) and institutions as businesses. I wonder when we will start thinking the other way, and use metaphors from living systems to refer to social institutions and organizations. Of course, people did: Paul certainly did in his appropriation of the body metaphor to refer to the Christian community. And poets have before and since. But we seem stuck with the mechanistic and the economic as the only common currency for thinking about things as wondrous as a gene.

The Science Friday web site has podcasts available, and lots of good things in their archives.