Introduction

Gene patenting has captured the headlines for the past four years, thanks in large part to the lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) brought against Myriad Genetics for the patents on the breast cancer genes, BRCA 1 and 2. Despite their recent celebrity, human gene patents have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for over thirty years. The commodification of the human body is not all that recent: one might be tempted to argue that gene patenting is the inevitable next step in the commodification of natural processes and products. Edward Yoxen dates the origins of the technological capitalization of life back to the 1920s (Yoxen 1981; Gaudillière 2008). Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite maintain that, “The patenting of genes […] was the culmination of a business approach that had been evolving in the chemical,...