Really, the issue has less to do with patents than with secrecy. The international Human Genome Project is about guaranteeing that the sequence of the human genome will not be a trade secret and will be freely available in everyone's hands, with no restrictions on its distribution or on its analysis. That is our purpose and that is the race that we have won. Most of the patents that are going to matter are held by the five or six genomics companies that preceded Celera, like Human Genome Sciences and Incyte Genomics. While I do agree that there have been very serious problems with patent law, Celera is not going to be the principal beneficiary of any of that.
All patents are a bargain between society and inventors made to incent innovation.
For the last three years the Patent Office was saying that naked gene sequence about which you know nothing, or very little, is patentable. When something is trivial and involves no substantial inventive step, like running a gene sequencer, it's my sense that society shouldn't be setting the bar so low. In fact, the difficult step is figuring out what a gene does and what it's good for. And therefore we ought to have a social policy that sets the bar there. Recently, the Patent Office has begun to move in the right direction, although it still has a ways to go.