Who owns your Genes?

Next Michael Crichton ISBN: 978-0060872984 Pub. Date: November 28, 2006 Publisher: HarperCollins

I don’t know if I read Michael Crichton for education or entertainment.

As I scanned the paperback section of the airport bookstore, “Clever,” I thought. Michael Crichton’s book occupied not one, but three, shelf spaces. The book has three different covers: same design of a monkey and bar code, different background colors of red, green, or white. It worked. I bought a copy.

And this is a usual page turner. Gerald the parrot is the most alive and memorable character. Other are all superficially developed and stereotyped. Then again, you read a Michael Crichton for education and entertainment, not for literature.

He strongly criticized the genetic industry as greedy, anarchical, predatory, and confused. The main point is ownership of genes can people own genes like intellectual properties?

But I own my body and therefore all my genes, if genes can be owned. I then own half of my biological children’s genes too. Unless there was a mutation, they are simply copies of my genes. In fact, biological parents together own all of children’s genes.

Hold on. Grand-parents own parents’ genes, by the same logic. When they die, their properties, including the genes, are inherited by their offspring. Uncles and aunts therefore own all cousins’ genes together. If we pushed upward in the ancestry line, eventually, in legal sense, there is only one possible conclusion: the whole human population together owns the human genome.

This is fun then. If genes can be owned like properties, then genes must be owned by the entire human population, therefore genes cannot be owned by anyone. Without too much effort, one will reach the same conclusion for genes of any species.

No one owns life. How simple and blatantly obvious can that be?

我也不知道我读 Michael Crichton 的著作是为了学习还是为了娱乐。我在机场书店浏览平装书时，看到 Michael Crichton 的同一本书占据了三个书架的位置，就因为它有三种不同的封面：设计是相同的，都是一只猴子上覆盖着条形码，只是背景色分别为红色、绿色和白色。我不禁感叹道：此举真是聪明啊！还真有点儿作用。我就买了一本。这本书真无法释手。鹦鹉 Gerald 是其中最生动最令人印象深刻的角色。其他角色都不够深入所以难免落于俗套。再次重申，读 Michael Crichton 的书是为了学习和娱乐，不是文学鉴赏。他尖锐地批判了基因工业的几大问题：贪婪、无法、掠夺和混乱。最主要的是基因的所有权问题——人们能像拥有知识产权一样拥有基因吗？

但我的身体是我的，如果基因能被拥有的话，我身体理的基因也当然是我的了。既然如此，我亲生子女们的一半基因也是我的。因为除非发生突变，那一半是我的基因。实际上生父母共同拥有他们子女所有的基因。

等一下。依此类推，祖父母拥有父母的基因。他们去世后，他们的遗产，包括基因所有权，都会被他们的子孙继承。叔父和姨妈会因此拥有堂兄弟姐妹们的基因。如果我们通过家族血统向上追溯，最终，从法律的角度，我们只有一个结论：整个人类拥有整个人类的基因。

有趣吧。如果基因能像物品一样被拥有，那么基因的主人一定是全人类，而不是个人。不用多想，任何物种都是如此。

没有人能拥有生命。这难道不是不言自明的吗？