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Jeremy Rifkin is at it again. In June, Rifkin and biology professor Stuart Newman made the national news when the US Patent Office rejected as unpatentable their proposal for a human/animal hybrid species. The Patent Office ruled that allowing any partially human organism to be patented would violate the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery.
Rifkin, who generally opposes all genetic engineering of organisms religiou grounds (his 1993 book, Algeny, cited creationists in its attack on Darwinian evolution), plans to appeal the decision and force the government to draw its regulations on the patentability of life forms more clearly in the apparent hope the government will decide to reject all patents on living organisms.
The obvious way out is for a court or the Patent Office to rule that it erred in its bizarre interpretation of the 13th amendment. Since a patent on an organism or a derivative of that organism (such as a genetically engineered human insulin-producing goat) does not grant anyone ownership of persons under U.S. law, the application of the 13th amendment in this case was patently absurd and represents a gross misunderstanding of the status of genetically engineering animals with human genes. This is a widespread misunderstanding, however, as the Internet is now filled with discussions about how corporations could one day own human beings (this line of reasoning makes about as much sense as claiming that the companies who make ultrasound equipment have an ownership stake in the fetuses their equipment helps diagnose).
In fact, in contradiction to the Patent Office's rejection of Rifkin and Newman's patent, the Patent Office has already issued several patents for animals that contain human genes or organs.
The danger, of course, is that politicians will react out of the same ignorance and misunderstanding as they rushed to act when the news broke about the cloning of Dolly the sheep. Without patent protection, many of the next generation of medical treatments that are already under development will be stymied and in many cases killed outright since it will be incredibly difficult for companies to recoup their development costs without such protections.
Rifkin himself is responsible for a lot of the misunderstandings of cloning and genetic research that many in the public have. Rifkin has a serious problem with reality -- he convinced numerous religious leaders to sign a petition in 1991 against genetic engineering by sending out a letter claiming that a biotech company had gained a patent for "an unaltered part of the human body." In fact the company in question, SyStemix, obtained a patent for a process of obtaining a modified version of human bone marrow stem cells that may someday have uses as a treatment for AIDS, cancer and other human diseases.