WHEN Jonas Salk was asked who held the patent for his newly created polio vaccine back in the 1950s, he famously replied: “There is no patent. Could you patent the Sun?”
Well no, but it often appears as though today’s biotechnologists are trying to patent everything under it (see “Footing the bill”). Worries about companies owning the essential building blocks of human life are nothing new. Journalists, campaigners and scientists have been voicing them for years, and when celebrating the culmination of the race to sequence the genome, Bill Clinton felt it necessary to calm fears with warm and…
