Religious voices in biotechnology: the case of gene patenting.

Religious traditions have long had more than passing interest in the developments of biotechnology--particularly as regards human life. Given the degree to which DNA is seen to be central to species and individual identity and the powers we are now obtaining over it, this should be no surprise. Further, religious traditions have largely endorsed the purported goals of biotechnology: human health and well-being. But on 18 May 1995, nearly 200 religious leaders joined with leading biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin in a press conference named the "Joint Appeal against Human and Animal Patenting," a move that many within the biotechnology industry could only interpret as seeking to inhibit biotechnological advance. What moral and religious concerns motivated this challenge to patenting? How could the biotechnology industry understand and respectfully attend to these concerns? What values were at play in the debates that followed the joint appeal? What lessons for future dialogue can be learned from attempts at conversation between the opposing positions? This essay is a report from a Hastings Center research project that accepted the task of addressing these questions. Specifically, the project focused on the patenting of human genetic material, a subset of the issues raised by the joint appeal. While the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office might seem a strange place for religious leaders to make a stand, the issue of patenting brings together a wide variety of concerns regarding biotechnology, some of which reflect on patenting itself and some of which engage biotechnology more generally. I believe it would be a mistake to conclude, as many in the industry did (perhaps because of the association with Rifkin), that religious opposition to patenting was largely motivated by fear of future abuse or moral transgression by biotechnology companies. While these fears indeed exist--along with other concerns about eugenics and corporate control of biotechnological resources-religious opposition to patenting itself also reflects concerns that are ethically noteworthy and often echoed in nonreligious critiques.[1] Thus a major purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that patenting is indeed an ethical issue, not simply an economic one as asserted by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO),[2] or a legal one as stated by the director of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.[3] In the end, I do not believe that the religious objections to gene patenting are sufficient on balance to warrant a full ban on all such patents, although certain patents-such as on engineered human embryos-would be objectionable. Moreover, there is room for further exploration of ethically preferable alternatives to current patent law. The primary task of this document, however, is to take the preliminary step of putting forward the values motivating this debate--especially what seems to be at stake for religious critics--in the ethically richest manner possible. Dialogues among interested parties since the joint appeal have demonstrated a certain "thinness" with regard to the range of values and world views at play, resulting in a general frustration of participants talking past each other. I will also provide analysis of the discussions following the May 1995 appeal and extrapolate some lessons for future dialogue at the intersection of religion and biotechnology. I hope that increasing the understanding of the complexity of the issues raised, in itself, will not only contribute to a more constructive dialogue at the intersection of religion and biotechnology, but ultimately lead toward more responsible ethics and policy in biotechnology itself Before proceeding to an analysis of these concerns, it is important to consider the context in which they are raised and how they are currently being expressed. A Brief Background By the time of the joint appeal in 1995 it had been fifteen years since the Supreme Court ruled in Diamond v. …