Don’t let Venter patent artificial life, says rival

A Nobel prize-winning British scientist has come out fighting against attempts by a US entrepreneur to patent 'artificial life'. Professor Sir John Sulston says that a successful attempt by Craig Venter to patent his techniques could give him a monopoly which would inhibit the progress of science.
 
Venter (above) grabbed headlines last week for creating 'artificial life' in his laboratory. Described today by Sulston as not artificial life but "a neat experiment", the discovery involved creating synthetic DNA based on analysis of one bacterium and then implanting that into another bacterium. The end result is the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA – and it has been nicknamed 'Synthia'.
 
Venter said last week his discovery could create a "new industrial revolution". He hopes to engineer bacteria which could create medicines, fuels – or even absorb greenhouse gas emissions. Critics said these claims were overstated.
 
Now Sulston has launched a media war, speaking to the BBC about Venter's patent applications. "I've read through some of these patents and the claims are very, very broad indeed," he said. "I hope very much these patents won't be accepted because they would bring genetic engineering under the control of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). They would have a monopoly on a whole range of techniques."

This is not the first time the two men have clashed: 10 years ago they headed rival teams racing to map the entire human genome for the first time. Sulston's was government- and charity-funded and made all its data public; Venter's was private enterprise, and sought to patent particularly useful sequences of the genome.
 
Sulston was publicly critical then of Venter's privateering approach and defiantly kept his own data public to undermine the commercial value of the US team's work. After public outcry on both sides of the Atlantic, Venter's organisation withdrew its patent applications.

"The confrontation 10 years ago was about data release," Sulston told the BBC yesterday. "We said that this was the human genome and it should be in the public domain. And I'm extremely glad we managed to pull this out of the bag."

Sulston, a bearded, self-confessed "nerd turned hippie", pointed to the example of US firm Myriad Genetics, which has just lost parts of its patent rights on two breast cancer genes after the legality of the patents it had been awarded were challenged by civil rights groups. Sulston said Myriad's patents had led to cancer patients having to pay thousands of dollars for treatment.

Speaking at the Royal Society in London, Sulston said that his objection to patents on genes from existing living organisms is that they are "discoveries" not inventions. He believes that patenting such breakthroughs stifles further scientific discovery.

However, a spokesman for JCVI said there was no possibility of Venter's applications leading to a monopoly: "There are a number of companies [which may have] filed some degree of patent protection on a variety of aspects of their work, so it would seem unlikely that any one group, academic centre or company would be able to hold a 'monopoly' on anything."

He added that the Venter Institute was committed to "open dialogue and discussion on all issues surrounding synthetic genomics".

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