Here’s a disconcerting thought: for the past thirty years, genes have been patentable. And we’re not just talking genetically modified corn – your genes, pretty much as they exist in your body, can and have been patented. The US government reports over three million gene patent applications have been filed so far; over 40,000 patents are held on sections of the human genome, covering roughly 20% of our genes.

Upset? You’re not alone. Critics argue that the patents stifle potential research into disease, keep new treatments off the market, and bring in serious money to Big Pharma – all by exercising property claims that shouldn’t exist. After all, genes aren’t inventions, which are patentable – they’re discoveries, which aren’t. As Luigi Palombi noted recently at the Open Science Summit, “You can’t patent Mount Everest; why can you patent a gene?” Here, we review the history of genetic law, the current state of affairs, and interview David Koepsell, an attorney and author of a recent book on gene patenting, Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush To Patent Your Genes.

The ACLU has been waging a legal war against gene patenting, and some forward progress has been made. A few months back, a major (and unexpected) victory against gene patenting came when a district judge struck down patent claims by Myriad Genetics. Back in 1998, Myriad patented several genes of the BRCA family; mutations along these genes increase susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer. The patents gave Myriad proprietary rights over diagnostic tests for the mutations – tests they sold for over $3,000 each.

On March 29, 2010, District Judge Robert W. Sweet invalidated seven of the BRCA patents owned by Myriad. The decision shocked supporters and critics alike, and Myriad has appealed the decision. What remains to be seen is whether it will reach and survive a federal court, and thereby become precedent to strike down further gene patents owned by biotech companies.

So how are genes patentable in the first place? Parts of your body have actually been patented for over a century. Adrenalin was patented in 1906; insulin was patented in 1923. The argument for chemical patents was basically that isolated and purified forms of the naturally occurring molecules are more medically valuable than the forms floating around in your bloodstream. A comparable logic is what allows the FDA to outlaw DMT – a chemical also produced within your body, but which acts as a powerful hallucinogenic in its concentrated form.

But gene patents got their big start in 1980 in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty. A GE engineer developed a bacterium capable of breaking down crude oil, and filed a patent for it. After a series of rulings and appeals, the case landed in the Supreme Court. On June 16, 1980, the court ruled in GE’s favor, and the first living organism was patented in the United States. The key distinction in the Diamond case was that the bacterium was man-made, and therefore constituted an invention.

Human gene patenting works on the logic that if a patent applicant has “isolated and purified” genetic material, it constitutes an invention on their part – even if the strand is identical to the DNA sequence found in nature. Proponents of gene patenting (i.e. generally, the companies or their patent lawyers) argue that patent protection is essential to retaining strong investment in genetic research, which speeds up progress in the field. It’s true that patents are important to the biomedical industry’s ability to attract capital – Myriad stock took a nose dive after the Supreme Count shot down their BRCA patents. But the claim that a world without gene patents would stifle genetic research (or even make it unprofitable) seems overstated at best, and disingenuous at worst.

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What if you had perfect pitch, a photographic memory, and astounding artistic ability? Allan Snyder thinks you already do. Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney and for years he’s been studying how the mind processes information. Certain individuals, often called savants, demonstrate amazing abilities: near total recall of memories, the ability to count a large number of items simply by glancing at them (numerosity), incredible musical talent, etc. Savants display these cognitive feats while often suffering from a neural disorder like Autism
. As described in his publication in The Royal Society, Snyder believes that these abilities arise as Autism (or other phenomenon) grants the individual ‘privileged access’ to data that would normally be overridden in the brain. With magnetic pulses, Snyder has even been able to temporarily ‘unlock’ savant-like abilities in average people! There’s a chance that everyone could one day have access to this kind of hidden potential in their minds.

When it comes to “releasing the hidden potential of your mind” I’m a big skeptic. Everyone from Uri Geller to Timothy Leary has pitched that line and most of the time it’s complete bunk. So when I first saw the following infographic about Snyder’s work, I was rather dismissive. Magnets on our head could make us better artists, give us perfect pitch, and let us remember anything like Rain Man? Sure. And magic crystals will heal my damaged chakras. But then I started to look deeper into Snyder’s work and I started seeing some real science on some really interesting phenomena.

Not all savants have Autism, and not all people with Autism develop savant talents. But there’s a big correlation between the two syndromes. Other people who develop savant-like skills suffer from brain trauma, or neurologically damaging diseases. While some may dispute whether savant talents even really exist, it seems clear that there are numerous cases of people with astounding mental talents. And these talents are clustered around abnormal brain activity.

Snyder has published numerous papers on cognitive processing and brain performance. His paper in The Philisophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (biological sciences) summarizes his work (and related work from others). To grossly paraphrase his findings: the right hemisphere of the brain seems to accumulate detailed quantified data from the sensory organs unconsciously. This data is effectively overwritten or forgotten as the left brain imposes labels and organization upon it. When the left-right communication is disturbed or somehow faulty, the detailed data can sometimes be accessed by the conscious mind.

Imagine you’re a business executive. An accountant in the office is responsible for gathering lots of data. She has records of everything – lots of numbers about the money spent on pencils, the exact costs of stamps used in January, the last names of all employees in Spain, etc. The middle manager below you takes her reports and summarizes them so you can read them quickly. Less money was spent on pencils, stamp costs are stable, employees in Spain still have last names. Easy to deal with, but not very exact. What if the middle manager got sick? Well then you, the business executive would have to read those accountant’s reports yourself. You wouldn’t read that stamp costs were stable, you’d read that they were exactly $128,092.61

This is a poor analogy of what may be happening in the brain. The left hemisphere is packaging information so that you can make conscious decisions. This is generally a good thing. When you see a tiger is trying to eat you, you don’t need to worry about how many stripes it has you need to recognize it’s a tiger and run.

Occasionally though, people’s brains function differently. Snyder thinks they are granted ‘privileged access’ to the unpackaged data and gain savant-like talents. This can cause problems, such as all the negative symptoms associated with Autism, but it opens the curious possibility that this data is potentially available to everyone. Our conscious mind seems to work in a very top-down sort of way, with hierarchical thinking giving rise to the problem solving skills that make our species a success. But what if we could temporarily disturb that arrangement to regain what that structure has cost us: exact recall of detailed data and calculations.

Snyder tried to see if he could unleash that potential. Over several years, he and other researchers have used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to interfere with the neurons in the left anterior temporal lobe. The bundled the rTMS device into a hat that could be worn while patients performed different tasks. Dubbed the ‘thinking cap’ by some, it effectively shut down the left hemisphere of the brain with magnetic fields. The results are interesting. Snyder has been able to induce the ability to draw as the eye sees (even without artistic training). He’s seen improved memory, better ability to notice typos/grammar mistakes, and improved numerosity. The latter has some of the clearest results (as published in Perception, 2006). Patients shown a random number of dots on a computer screen for a brief period of time are asked to give the number of dots shown. Immediately after rTMS treatment, 10 out of 12 patients saw improvements. 8 out of these 12 saw that improvement disappear an hour after rTMS stopped. In other words, savant skills seem to appear and then slowly fade away after rTMS. A placebo treatment did not induce the same results – something is clearly going on here. … Continue Reading

In order to understand our history, the development of our society and political structure, the influence of the large foundations in America is an essential area of research. Their investment into the social sciences and medical establishment shaped their direction for the 20th Century and beyond. Social control and eugenics became a primary directive. These ideas, primarily due to the work of the Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies, spread throughout the intelligentsia and elite circles throughout the western world.

Dr. Lily E. Kay’s 1993 book “The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology” documents much of the early history behind the rise of eugenics and life sciences. Kay demonstrates that the drive for social control and eugenics was largely responsible for the emergence and growth of the science of molecular biology. Dr. Kay is a recipient of the Smithsonian Fellowship at the National Museum of American History, and an assistant professor of history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Kay’s 2001 obituary from MIT describes her as “…one of the outstanding historians of biology of her generation.”

As Dr. Kay documents, large foundations effectively drew the maps for society to follow. The intelligentsia, trained and schooled under the strong influence of the foundations, closely followed the vision of the elite. This vision extended into the realms of education, politics, religion, and the financial world. As Dr. Lily Kay has painstakingly documented, this influential group set out in the United States to engage in a massive research campaign to discover the inner workings of man and in turn to devise methods of social-biological control. The United States, in turn, became the 20th Century progenitor of eugenics.

Dr. Kay paints a clear picture of the massive influence that the wealthy elite in the United States wields, even to the “…development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States…” Kay writes,

“Thus by the end of the Progressive Era, even before the large-scale commitment to the “advancement of knowledge” spurred by World War I, the human sciences received considerable support from the large foundations. Their numerous projects and the unprecedented scope of their financial and institutional resources shaped the development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States. Through education, public opinion, stimulation of specific research agenda, and the promotion of selective categories of knowledge and research, the Foundation played a key role in the creation of a hegemonic bloc; the resources and prestige flowing into those fields relevant to problems of social control were instrumental in the formation of consensus between social and political elites, on the one hand, and academic interests on the other.”

Large foundations – primarily Rockefeller and Carnegie – were investigated in 1915 by the United States Congress, which reported nearly identical findings to the later 1953 Reece Committee, dedicated to the same cause. The 1915 U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations reported that:

“The domination by the men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social survival of the nation. This control is being extended largely through the creation of enormous privately managed funds for indefinite purposes, hereafter designated “foundations”, by the endowment of colleges and universities, by the creation of funds for the pensioning of teachers, by contributions to private charities, as well as through controlling or influencing the public press…

As Dr. Kay documents, many of the original members of the large foundations and their offshoots were driven by the philosophy that they were the chosen elite. In their minds, moral authority was on their side. They sought to guide the direction of the nation and mold mankind’s development. Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist minister who worked closely with the Rockefeller family and its many initiatives, is quoted as saying,

“…when you die and come to approach the judgment of Almighty God what do you think He will demand of you…? Do you think he will inquire into your trivial sins, your paltry values? NO! He will ask you just One Question: ‘What did you do as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation?’”

Chester Bernard, who served as president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1948-1952, was unquestionably a member of the establishment. He saw what the Rockefeller Foundation and much of the scientific community was attempting to do and spoke out against it, but couched his criticism with the assumption of pure motives. Bernard writes in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1948 Annual Report,

“Inherent in our systematic efforts to promote the welfare of mankind there may be an assumption that… by reason and science we may govern the future of unborn generations in ways that we know are right… Do we mean that because we have learned to navigate the tides we shall also control them? … We have already begun the attempts to regulate local weather. Where do we think we shall stop — with the control of the speed of rotation of the earth, of its revolution around the sun? … Pride goeth before a fall.”

Dr. Kay comments on Bernard’s criticism, stating that, “Given this wisdom, it is paradoxical that Barnard did not hear the dissonance between his poignant words and the Rockefeller Foundation’s agenda in biology, where the primary justification for studying the fundamental mechanisms of soma and psyche was the promise of intervening in the course of human behavior on a global scale.”

This original directive has remained unchanged. However, Dr. Kay concludes by stating that “The eugenic goals, which had informed the design of the molecular biology program and had been attenuated by the lessons of the Holocaust, revived by the late 1950′s… a new eugenics… came to rest in safety on the high ground of medical discourse and latter-day rhetoric of population control.”

Today we see this agenda moving full speed ahead. Foundations are acting more and more like governments. In an interview with the Seattle Times, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was asked, “Some say the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the WHO.” Moon responded,

“On the contrary that is what we really want — contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies. We need to have political support, but it doesn’t give us all that we need. NGOs and philanthropies and many foundations such as Bill Gates Foundation — they’re taking a very important role.”

In 1996 the Rockefeller Foundation supplied grant money for early research on edible vaccines. The $58,000 grant, given to the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University, was aimed at developing and transferring edible vaccine technology to developing countries.

Edible vaccines, according to the Indian Journal of Medical Microbiology, will be a more socioculturally acceptable alternative to needles. In other words, people will be less resistant to eating a mundane banana than taking a shot in the arm. The Journal states that new edible vaccine technology may serve a dual purpose of birth control.

As calls are made for lithium to be added to water supplies world-wide and genetically modified organisms spread throughout the ecosystem, the elite agenda of “…intervening in the course of human behavior on a global scale…” is fast becoming reality.

Source – Old Thinker News

WASHINGTON — A new, virulent and drug-resistant strain of E. coli bacteria is infecting people in the United States and posing a significant public health threat, doctors reported on Friday.
The new strain is called ST131 and caused many of the E. coli infections resistant to antibiotics in the fluoroquinolone and cephalosporin classes, the researchers said.

“If this strain gains one additional resistance gene, it will become almost untreatable and will be a true superbug, which is a very concerning scenario,” Dr. James Johnson of the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, who led the study, said in a statement.

Writing in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Johnson and colleagues said the ST131 strain has been reported in several countries and across the United States.

They tested samples from 127 patients with E. coli infections that resisted strong extended-spectrum cephalosporin and fluoroquinolone antibiotics in 2007.  Of these, genetic tests showed 54 were from the new ST131 strain.

Those samples accounted for only 17 percent of the total, but they made up 44 percent of the drug-resistant isolates. More alarming, they made up more than half of the samples resistant to two or more drugs and they accounted for nearly 70 percent of the samples resistant to fluoroquinolones or extended-spectrum cephalosporins.

Those drugs increasiningly are used as the go-to treatment for many conditions, including urinary tract infections, and in hospitalized patients.

Source: MSNBC

Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.

Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.

They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behavior and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.

After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phone, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.

The queen bee in the “mobile” hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.

They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen. Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank.

Ved Prakash Sharma and Neelima Kumar, the authors of the report in the journal Current Science, wrote: “Increase in the usage of electronic gadgets has led to electro-pollution of the environment. Honeybee behavior and biology has been affected by electro-smog since these insects have magnetite in their bodies which helps them in navigation.

“There are reports of sudden disappearance of bee populations from honeybee colonies. The reason is still not clear. We have compared the performance of honeybees in cellphone radiation exposed and unexposed colonies.

“A significant decline in colony strength and in the egg laying rate of the queen was observed. The behavior of exposed foragers was negatively influenced by the exposure, there was neither honey nor pollen in the colony at the end of the experiment.”

Tim Lovett, of the British Beekeepers Association, said that hives have been successful in London where there was high mobile phone use.

“Previous work in this area has indicated this [mobile phone use] is not a real factor,” he said. “If new data comes along we will look at it.”

He said: “At the moment we think is more likely to be a combination of factors including disease, pesticides and habitat loss.”

The UK Government has set aside £10 million for research into the decline of pollinators like bees, but the BBKA claim much more money is needed for research into the problem, including studies on pesticides, disease and new technology like mobile phones.

According to the University of Durham, England’s bees are vanishing faster than anywhere else in Europe, with more than half of hives

dying out over the last 20 years.

The most recent statistics from last winter show that the decline in honey bees in Britain is slowing, with just one in six hives lost.

This is still above the natural rate of ten per cent losses, but a vast improvement on previous years.

There has been an increase in the number of thefts of hives across the world and in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives.
[Via:Telegraph]