Patent law and life (or, who owns your genes?)

The New York Times discusses the patentability of human genes and other aspects of genomic medicine.

... From the moment the first biotech patents were granted in 1980, the industry was hailed as a new frontier — uncharted territory where a new generation of scientist-inventors could reap the traditional rewards of innovation.

But even as the gold rush began, critics as varied as scientists and human rights advocates declared that biotech’s new intellectual property frontier was already occupied. Claims of novelty and innovation as the basis for life patents, they said, disregarded the realities of not only nature, but also of research practices, democratic decision-making and global governance....

There is a silver lining, in the long term: the monopolies conferred by patent law, rightly or wrongly, last for a far shorter term than the eternally extensible copyrights granted by our current system. A U.S. patent with a term of "20 years from the earliest claimed filing date or 17 years from the issue date", will become void within one generation. Will this last?

I wouldn't be surprised any day to see a heavily-funded bribery/lobbying push to make patent protection "harmonize" with copyright protection, so that biotech and pharmaceutical corporations can stop depending on new research and instead, like Disney and the rest of the copyright barons, kick back and enjoy eternal monopoly profits from the works of the dead.