What 13,000 Patents Involving the DNA of Sea Life Tell Us About the Future

This article published by the New York Times discusses a paper from Science Advances on patents on genes of living organisms that are located in the ocean. The articles begins the discussion by introducing a recent debate in the United Nations about how the genes of many living organisms are being used and the development of a global legal framework for genetic resources. Private companies in Germany, USA, Japan, Norway, Britain, France, Denmark, Canada, Israel, and the Netherlands own 98% of the patents involving marine organisms’ DNA; and this is leaving to a new kind of global inequality. These genetic prospectors are looking for organisms with exceptional traits that provide the missing portion of a product that will hopefully develop a new or alternative treatment. After various examples, the article concludes with the experimentation of growing of Omega-3 fatty acids on land modifying genetic codes of a Canola plant with DNA from marine microorganisms. 

Ana Maria Torres Martinez