Pharmaceutical companies patent life is possible?

A division of the pharmaceutical company Merck has, according to a report in the newspaper „The time“ a „Company strategy that further weakens the protection that the origins of human life enjoy today.“ The company is expected to register a large number of biotechnology patents that would be dubious from the point of view of ethicists and would also mean that other companies would have to pay royalties to the patent owner. The biotechnology expert and former members of the Green Group in the Bavarian Parliament and Greenpeace, Christoph Then, now wants to appeal.

A division of the pharmaceutical company Merck has, according to a report in the newspaper „The time“ a „Company strategy that further weakens the protection that the origins of human life enjoy today.“ The company is expected to register a large number of biotechnology patents that would be dubious from the point of view of ethicists and would also mean that other companies would have to pay royalties to the patent owner. The biotechnology expert and former members of the Green Group in the Bavarian Parliament and Greenpeace, Christoph Then, now wants to appeal.European patent law, which has been in place since mid-1998, prohibits patents on the cloning and industrial use of human embryos. But a gray area in the guidelines adopted by the European Parliament is that it does not explicitly apply to individual cells or isolated or later destroyed parts.

At the beginning of 2000, the environmental organization Greenpeace publicly announced its opposition to a patent for the removal and breeding of cells from embryos of genetically engineered people at the University of Edinburgh, which had already been granted by the European Patent Office in Munich at the end of 1999.

Now, a division of the pharmaceutical company Merck has obtained approval for a patent for fertility therapy and related oocyte treatment processes. Loud „The time“ Then came, who is also co-founder and CEO of „testbiotech e.V. Institute for Independent Impact Assessment in Biotechnology“ is, some other approval requirements of the company and its subsidiaries for patents related to human embryos and germ cells. The problem is, according to Then on gulli.com, that the current patent „indirectly grant rights to the treated oocytes“.

So far, Success has been quite successful with its actions and appeals, it remains to be seen how well the patent attorneys of the company have worked and how the European Patent Office for Biotechnology decides with its director, Dublin-born genetics researcher Siobhán Yeats. (Thorsten Fischer, Naturopath Osteopathy, 11.04.2010)

Also read:
Patents for embryos“ on gulli.com
"Embryos in Test Tube" by Greenpeace