ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to answer two related questions. First, what special ethical issues (if any) are raised by gene patenting? Second, how strong are the moral arguments against this practice? My focus here is on the human body. However, a sharp distinction between intellectual property in the human body and that concerning other species is, at least at the level of practical genetics, hard to maintain. For, as Resnik puts it,
many genes that occur in human populations also occur in primate, mammalian, and other animal populations . . . biological context determines the humanness of genes: a gene is human if and only if it contributes to the structures or functions of human beings. Thus, genes that code for hair proteins are human genes even though many of these genes also occur in chimpanzee populations.1
