This advance may give science the power to eliminate diseases, grow new organs, select healthy traits in a petri dish and insert them into individuals, and, ultimately, create human beings. As is the case with any invention, the financial incentive lies soundly within the framework of the starchy realm of patent law. Winning the Gene Pool Once considered the driest and perhaps least titillating specialty in the field of law, patents have taken center stage in recent years as both electronic technology and medical research have experienced explosive growth. Ironically, it was the coming together of computers and biological research that finally allowed scientists to reach the holy grail of the decoded human genome. Most of the work to map the genome was done by supercomputers simultaneously comparing the trillions of bits of information on human DNA samples.
Profit enters the picture after researchers win patents on their discoveries.
Then, they can license rights to do further research or to use patented processes as ingredients in new experiments. The real dollar value of those licensing rights amounts to billions over time. Yet the law lags far behind the science, leaving questions of what is, and what should be, patentable. Even if a discovery is patented, questions remain about whether to legislate restrictions on the use of the patented invention in the name of public policy. For example, some are calling for a global ban on human cloning.