Biotechnology

Abstract

In 1980, the US Supreme Court in its decision, Diamond vs. Chakrabarty (1980, 206 USPQ 193), on the patentability of a genetically engineered bacterium, stated that the relevant distinction to be made was not that “between living and inanimate things, but between products of nature, whether living or not, and human-made inventions.” Today, almost two decades later, most biopharmaceutical products are natural proteins based on the cloning of human genes. As genetic engineering and in particular, transgenics occupy biotechnology, the distinction between the products of nature and human-made inventions is increasingly difficult to trace in the chain of living matter. The field of comparative genomics is discovering an abundance of shared genes among life forms. As a result, “[g]enomics is so intertwined with other technologies and products of the molecular revolution that it is hard to trace its influence in a single company or industrial structure.” (Enriquez 1998, 925).

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

JohnDonne (1572–1631)

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions [1624], no. 17.