Should human life in any form be patent-ed for commercial use? Last week in Washington, D.C., 187 religious leaders representing virtually every major religious tradition in the United States issued a resounding “No.” In a very rare show of unanimity, Catholics, Evangelicals, Orthodox and mainline Protestants joined Jews, Muslims and Buddhists in asserting that “we believe that humans and animals are creations of God, not humans, and as such should not be patented as human inventions.” Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptists’ Christian Life Commission, was particularly vehement. “We are opposed to the commodifying of human materials,” he said. “It’s grotesque.” The coalition was put together by Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, a veteran gadfly working on bio-technology issues.
This is not just another Galileo-like clash between religion and science. It’s a high-stakes moral rumble that involves billions of dollars and affects the future of the burgeoning biotech industry and the nation’s basic research institutions. Earlier this year, for example, Amgen paid Rockefeller University $20 million for an exclusive license to develop products from a gene that seems to play a role in obesity. It could cost Amgen 10 times that amount to bring an obesity-fighting product to market-and produce even more in sales. Like many giant biotech companies, Amgen defends the patent in practical terms. Without the protection of a patent, which grants companies exclusive rights for 17 years, “there will be no breakthrough drugs for patients,” says Peter Teeley, Amgen’s vice president for government and public relations.
The moral conflict is clear enough. On one side is the clergy’s position that haman life, even in genetic form, is sacred and should not be bought and sold like a commodity. Even genetically engineered animals, they argue, should not become the property of those who create them. “No one should own the right to make claim to an entire species of life,” says Rabbi David Superstein, a lawyer and director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. On the other, there is industry’s assertion of social utility: patenting of genetically engineered products allows the market-place to discover and deliver remedies to needy patients. Indeed, the Riotechnology Industry Organization answered the clergy with endorsements from a dozen groups such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Both sides can appeal to cultural and legal precedents. American law prohibits the sale of human organs, such as hearts and livers, even though there is a market for them. “American culture considers these things to be too close to our identity as human beings to be treated as commodities,” says James Nelson, an ethicist at the Hastings Center in New York. For Nelson, the question is whether genes deserve similar protection.
But Americans are a practical people, and the law reflects that bent, too. In a 1980 case the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that a genetically engineered organism that cleans up oil spills was a new invention, one that could be patented like other products, Since then the patent office has applied the court’s reasoning to products involving human genes. Among them: a substance developed from human genes by Genentech that breaks up blood clots in heart-attack victims.
What are the moral limits to genetic engineering? And who will set them? There is nothing in current law– though a great deal in scientific knowledge-to prevent genetic engineers from someday altering human embryos to create, say, designer children. And the arguments from industry–social utility–might be much the same. At the very least, the clergy’s protest should produce an overdue public debate on what is best left to God and nature, and what is open to human intervention.
