Sparks: A 1970s patent that changed the course of commercial biotechnology

Men scramble for titles to the very fire that consumes them. This decree seeks to own the wind. It will fail. Nature remains the only creditor we cannot delay.

While learned gentlemen debate the ownership of these tiny invisible engines, I observe that the labor of the kitchen and the nursery, which sustains the very life they claim to invent, receives no such legal protection.

That the common heritage of the biological world should be enclosed by a temporary monopoly suggests a departure from the principle that no generation has a right to encumber the earth beyond the term of its own existence.

Your patent grants you power over the molecule, yet you remain a slave to the fear of losing the profit it generates. Examine this. The molecule is indifferent. Your peace is the only property worth defending.

We are eager to splice the seed but slow to wonder why the original bean was not enough. Most of these improved lives are merely more expensive ways of being miserable. I prefer the wild apple.

The scientists toasted the new patent with expensive champagne in a bright room, while in the corner, a technician wondered if his daughter’s cough would ever be cured by a medicine he could actually afford to buy.

Just as the river’s force is governed by the slope of the mountain, this splicing of invisible threads follows a geometry already written in the hawk’s wing and the lily’s root. We do not invent; we merely copy.

You celebrate the legal triumph of your design, yet you have not asked what the living thing you have summoned into this cold market will demand of you once it realizes it has been patented but not loved.

They have found a way to put a seal on the blood itself. It is the same old cannibalism, only now the teeth are made of paper and the banquet is held in a laboratory with very clean floors.

This greening power flows through every leaf and limb by divine decree, and any parchment signed by man that claims to own the very breath of the marrow is but a shadow cast against the sun.

In the markets of the West, they sell rights to things no eye can see, which is a curious custom compared to the spice traders of Malabar who at least allow a man to smell the cargo before he pays.

It is a triumph of modern reason that we may now legally own the specific arrangement of a creature's guts, and I look forward to the day when breathing itself is subdivided into taxable proprietary increments for the public good.

Things that are unseemly: a beautiful discovery about the essence of life being dragged into a dusty room full of lawyers. A secret that belongs to the morning dew being weighed in a scale made of gold.

You say you own the pattern of the life inside the cell, but I have carried children in this body that others claimed to own by law, and the law never did understand where the soul begins.

The patent is a mechanism to transform the fundamental biological conditions of our existence into a commodity, ensuring that even the evolution of species is subordinated to the iron necessity of capital accumulation.

Following the successful patenting of the microscopic, the ministry has begun preparations for the privatization of the color blue, which is expected to yield significant dividends by the second quarter of next year.