“You know your hand, your right hand? Would you like to use your right hand? Not so fast, my friend -  that will be ten dollars. After all, I have a U.S. patent on the right hands of all human beings.”

In simplified terms, but disturbingly not so simplified to be absurd, this is in fact the law - but instead of something as large as a hand, companies are slicing up patents of your even more valuable genetic sequences.

While the U.S. has been granting patents for chemical compositions for more than a 100 years, a 1980 Supreme Court decision - Diamond v. Chakrabarty - granted companies to ability to file for “certain genetically altered bacteria that is not naturally occurring.” But like taste in music, what did they know of genetics in 1980?

Ever since, from head-to-toe you have been sold at the market in microscopic servings - the rationale being that without patents to profit from, research organizations would not aggressively study the human genome to unlock its secrets, which then would hinder all the benefits that could be revealed to mankind.

In an effort to increase transparency into the human medical condition, decisions were made to give gatekeepers the authority to grant access and take it away - the consequences of which are startling.

Now that innovations in medicine and genomics have allowed more scientists to study the human genome, and provide personalized medicine based on these inherant sequences, the same companies who got into the gold rush early can now grant or deny patient testing using that patient’s own genetic sequences, can now prevent research organizations from using the full scope of a sequence to conduct cancer reseach in order maximize profit on a commodity that is questionably immoral to claim ownership of.

A lawsuit challenging the legality of genetic patents was filed today, however, by five cancer patients, the American Civil Liberties Union, pathology organizations with more than 100,000 members, and genetic researches. The landmark lawsuit seeks to end this post-modern drama, and facilitate the promises of genomic testing and personalized medicine that, through upcoming legislative healthcare reforms, the American people will come to expect as much their right to their… well… their own genomic sequences.

During the 1980’s we came upon a precipice overlooking a new era in medical transparancy. We gave the keys to who ever was willing to put in the work, giving rise not to more transparancy, but an oligarchy. And through this landmark court case, hopefully we can take the keys back from people who should never have been granted legal authority to begin with.

It makes me think of another field that is on the edge of integrating new technologies on a massive scale for the intended benefit of all - government. Like genetics, government innovations seek to provide transparency and efficiency while empowering the individual - addressing large scale issues in subsets of microcosms.

As new innovations inevitably give rise to new gatekeepers - as discussed in my last post - we must ask ourselves, who are we giving the keys to, and will it only lead to us having to strip them away 20 years later?

Currently, most innovations are coming from outside of the government, who then weed out the most gimmicky of the bunch . Can something as powerful as civic empowerment be really trusted, however, in the hands of non-government companies who profit off of it? Or, as Ayn Rand posed, is the market economy the only solution to… well… anything.

After all, I can’t afford to lose my right hand to Government 2.0 like I did to genetic patenting - in politics, we need the backs of our right hands for slapping.