[wordup] a bit on human cloning

[Adam Shand]

I just got back from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference where I
was helping to represent freenetworks.org and the whole community wireless
thang.  It was a lot of fun and one of the highlights for me was that
Lawrenece Lessig gave the closing keynote speach talking about his new
creation called the "Creative Commons".

Hopefully I'll write up a little bit about it as there was some
interesting stuff going on.

Adam.

From: mikem at alaska.net

Got the below article from a conservative/christian/family-centric mailing
list that I'm subscribed to.  As usual, they fail to give any references,
and it's loaded with opinion/bias, but if it's true it provides some
interesting food for thought.

I did some digging, and found the following links that seems to support
this:

http://www.icta.org/intelprop/temp.htm
http://www.icta.org/intelprop/HumanPatentExecSumm.pdf
http://www.icta.org/intelprop/6211429.pdf

If I read this right, there's potential for corporate ownership of cloned
humans.  ???

Well anyways, thought I'd toss this to you for consumption.

----

Do Humans Own Patents, Or Do Patents Own People?

It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention. But when it
comes to cloning, there are no mothers -- or fathers, only cold-hearted
scientists.  Yet according to the U.S. government, cloning is an invention
worthy of a patent. Last April, our government gave the University of
Missouri intellectual property rights to cloning technology.  As Patent
Watch executive director Andrew Kimbrell said, "This isn't a slippery
slope ... this is an ethical and legal free fall!"  It seems to have
escaped the government that cloning involves human life--not products or
inventions.  The Patent Office is reducing human embryos to mere medical
merchandise.  The University says it had no intention of owning human
beings or clones, but if that's true, why didn't they specify that in
their application?  Thus far, the news has had one positive effect, and
that's stirring up controversy which might help turn the tide against
cloning.