The ruling from the European Court of Justice that prevents patenting embryonic stem cell-derived products is biting. The UK’s patenting authority has stated it will not approve patents of products that result from the destruction of human embryos. From the Out-law.com story:
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) will automatically exclude inventions from patentability if a process from which an invention results includes the destruction of human embryos.The IPO said it was changing its approach to the consideration for patentability of inventions in the human genetics field following a recent interpretation of EU laws by the European Court of Justice (ECJ)...
The Biotech Directive states that an element isolated from the human body can be protected by a patent even if the structure of that element is identical to that of a natural element and its industrial application is disclosed in the patent. The Biotech Directive further states that “uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes” shall be considered unpatentable.
This is a crucial issue. If Big Biotech can’t make big bucks (or pounds, euros, etc.) from destroying nascent human life, it will move on to ethical biotechnological processes, as is already occurring. The USA needs to adopt the same policy.
But here’s a big question: Will patents be allowed for products resulting from human cloning? I hope not, and for the same reason. Human cloning creates a new human individual just as surely does fertilization. But facts will be denied in the pursuit of Brave New World profits. Indeed, during the great ESCR debate, some in the science community argued that fertilized embryos that haven’t implanted aren’t really embryos. If they would spout that nonsense for a fertilized embryo, imagine a cloned embryo. If cloning is ever accomplished, I think we would find ourselves facing the materialist equivalent of the assertion that a clone would not have a soul in order to open up all resource exploitation doors.
Oh, that’s right: Cloning advocates have been making such false statements for more than ten years, as did the late Christopher Reeve, shown in the Center for Bioethics and Culture documentary Lines That Divide, embedded below. It wasn’t his fault. That is what he was told by those for whom he was fronting, who definitely knew better:
P.S. Going through these old clips, it is remarkable at how astonishingly wrong most predictions made by ESCR advocates proved to be.
