Gene Patents

Pausing the Patent Menagerie

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Bioethics and Contemporary Culture
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

While the dust has not yet settled on Hwang Woo-Suk's cloning debacle in South Korea,ⁱ news has been released that the Salk Institute's Fred Gage has created chimeric mice by injecting 100,000 human embryonic stem cells into the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos.

Stanford Medical Center bioethicist David Magnus opines that: "The worry is if you humanize them too much you cross certain boundaries. . . . But I don't think this research comes even close to that."ⁱⁱ Indeed, but at what point might those boundaries be crossed? Must we wait for some tragedy before we grapple as a culture with the most fundamental question of all: what does it mean to be human?

Bioethics' so-called "yuck factor" - that intuition that something might not be right - is meant to urge us to pause and ask salient questions. But in a science guild driven by consumerism more than altruism, there is no time to pause. Instead of a moment for quiet reflection, the guild is overcome with competitive grasping to conquer the next great frontier for, well, the buck.

To wit, buried in stories about "humice" (the human-mouse chimeras), "geeps" (goat-sheep hybrids), and the "golly-gee-whiz" response they evoke, we need to recall that patents are pending on a growing menagerie of human-animal hybrids, doubtlessly including this new "neuromouse."

Since 1980, living organisms have been judged to be patentable by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Since then, a number of organisms have been patented. In 1984, the courts ruled that human tissues could be patented. By 1988, the famous "oncomouse" for studying human cancer had been patented. A decade later, in 1998, Advanced Cell Technology applied for a patent on a human-cow hybrid generated through somatic cell nuclear transfer using a cow egg and cells from researcher Jose Cibelli's own cheek. And on it goes.

In 1997, the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future (IBHF) Fellow Stuart Newman ingeniously applied for a patent on a human-animal hybrid that he never intended to exploit. Astonishingly, it took seven years for the USPTO to decide that his "invention" would be too human to be patentable in light of the Constitutional protections on a person's privacy and protections against human slavery.ⁱⁱⁱ

In the account of the Salk Institute's recent experiment, Dr. Cibelli said, "the idea is to hijack the machinery of the egg."^iv Truer words were never spoken. Composition of matter patents on animal-human chimeras not only capture the machinery of the egg, they seize the transgenic animal itself for potential exploitation.

So, we have two questions of gargantuan proportions on the table: (1) what does it mean to be human?; and (2) where do human-animal chimeric patents end? Yet the juggernaut continues. Isn't it time to take a deep breath and rethink what it is we're doing, and why?

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Contemporary Culture, at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in Deerfield, Illinois, and is a Fellow of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future.

ⁱSNU to Fill Hwang Probe Panel with Outsiders, Dec. 13, 2005, available at >http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200512/200512130017.html (last visited Feb. 15, 2006).
ⁱⁱCarl T. Hall, In the Brains of Mice Grow the Cells of Man: Embryonic Implants Mature into Neurons to Help Fight Disease, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Dec. 13, 2005, available at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/13/MNG0GG79A81.DTL (last visited Feb. 15, 2006).
ⁱⁱⁱRick Weiss, U.S. Denies Patent for a Too-Human Hybrid: Scientist Sought Legal Precedent to Keep Others from Profiting from Similar "Invention," WASHINGTON POST, Feb. 13, 2005, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19781-2005Feb12.html (last visited Feb. 15, 2006).
^ivPaul Elias, Mice with Human Cells in Brains Created, Dec. 13, 2005, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, available at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/251811_mice13.html (last visited Feb. 15, 2006).