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I guess that's not surprising. It's more surprising to me that anyone allowed patenting of the human genome in the first place. How someone could equate "sequencing" with "inventing" boggles my mind. There are billions of examples of prior art walking around among us, for crying out loud! It's as if whoever "rediscovered" cuneiform writing should have been able to patent it...

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It's utterly disgusting.

The only thing you can't patent is a live human being or a mental process. Everything else is fair game.

There has been an enormous row over for instance the patenting of basmati rice, a staple food in many countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmati

The patents are for the use of these molecules as drugs in order to treat a disease. That is a very non-obvious and inventive process to figure out which of the 25000 genes in the human body will be useful as a drug - and what the exact composition of that drug should be and how to make it, administer it, etc.

I don't believe genome patents require you to show how you've invented a process to use the genome- only the string of letters on a piece of ticker tape.

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