The Roslin Institute announced last week that it had applied to patent the method by which its scientists had cloned Dolly the sheep. The patent, if granted, would apply to 'nuclear transfer technology' in both human and animal cells. One point of the patent is to help fund research into cures for diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer and heart failure. Its other aim is to make some money. Last May, the Roslin Institute was taken over by Geron, an American biotech company. Geron has committed ＄32.5 million to research at the Roslin. It wants to get its money back. Two scientists from Stanford who developed the use of restriction enzymes, one of the fundamental techniques in biotechnology, made about pounds 80 million out of it in the 17 years before the patent expired. So you can see why Geron-Roslin is so keen to get its patent. There's nothing wrong with that. Without the prospect of a return at the end of investment, no one would ever lend money to anyone involved in bio-medical research—and given the huge sums now required to develop a new drug, or a new diagnostic test for some medical condition, that would mean there wouldn't be any research. It is wonderful when people give money to worthwhile causes with no hope of personal gain. But appealing to altruism simply won't raise the billions required to develop and market drugs and therapies that rely on biotechnology. For that, you have to appeal to investors' self-interest—which is why the bulk of medical research is funded not by charities or even tax-payers but by private companies and individuals. The fact that biotech research depends on patents generates profound hostility. The opposition to the patenting of genetic sequences, cells, tissues and clones—critics call it 'the privatization of nature'—takes many forms, from a Luddite desire to stop scientific research to a genuine, if mistaken, conviction that common ownership is always morally preferable to private property. But all of the objections have a single root. the sense that it must be wrong to make money out of the constituents of the human body. They cannot be 'owned' by any individual, because they belong to everyone. There cannot be 'property in people'. That is a profound mistake. The truth is rather the opposite: there is only property in things because there is property in people. People own their own bodies, and that ownership is the basis of their property rights (and most other individual rights, come to that). The problem with the law as it stands is that it doesn't sufficiently recognize an individual's property rights over his or her own body, and his or her entitlement to make money out of it. The outcome of a lawsuit in the US nearly 10 years ago defined the de facto rules governing the ownership of human tissues, and the financial exploitation of the discoveries that derive from them. In Moorev the Regents of UCLA the issue was whether an individual was entitled to a share of the profits that a biotech company made from developing drugs or treatments derived from cells that came from his body. Dr David Golde had discovered that John Moore, one of his patients, had a pancreas whose cells had some unusual properties that might be helpful in treating a form. of cancer. In his laboratory, Golde developed what his called a 'cell line' from Moore's cells and patented it. When Moore found out, he sued Dr Golde for a share of whatever profits the cell line generated. Mr. Moore lost. The court said he had no right to any of those profits, because he did not own the cells removed from his body. Moreover, the court held that since 'research on human cells plays a critical role in medical research', granting property rights to the patient from whom the cells came threatened to 'hinder research by restricting access to the raw materials'. In essence, that decision said that biotech companies could own and make money out of human cells a