<http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,52666,00.html>
Scientists may soon be downloading our DNA from Kazaa and Audiogalaxy, if a California biotech firm has its way.
Companies doing genomic research, like Redwood City's Maxygen, have a problem. To make money, the companies feel they need to control the rights to the DNA sequences they uncover. But patenting these sequences is ethically and legally tricky.
So, Maxygen's scientists and lawyers are proposing a downright odd solution to this pickle: Encode the DNA sequences as MP3s or other music files and then copyright these genetic "tunes." There's been software on the market for years that can make this switch.
As the "authors" of these DNA-based songs, Maxygen could, in theory, control the rights to the compositions for 95 years or more -- as opposed to the 17 years given under current patent law.
No one's yet tried to copyright encoded DNA sequences. But Maxygen has already applied for a patent on this kind of musical protection -- to the dismay of many in the biotech world.
"These efforts are a form of theft, an attempt to privatize our common biological heritage," said Jonathan King, an MIT professor of microbiology and board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.
Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at University of Wisconsin, asked, "Where is the public benefit in keeping (a DNA sequence) a trade secret?"
Willem Stemmer, Maxygen's vice president of research, said he welcomed the criticism. The current regulations on patenting DNA sequences, he said, came about after human genome mappers Celera Genomics made a controversial attempt to patent thousands of partial DNA sequences.
"There was a huge outcry in the field. It polarized the community and debate started," Stemmer said. "Without the initial insult, we wouldn't have the rules defined. Intellectually, that's how I look at (Maxygen's copyright push)."
Despite a 2001 attempt by a company to copyright celebrity genes, nearly everyone involved agrees that naturally occurring DNA itself can't be copyrighted. That kind of protection only applies to "original works of authorship," and no company can claim to have written somebody's genetic code.
But there is more than a bit of art inherent in encoding DNA as a song. The four units of DNA -- represented by the letters G, T, A, and C -- combine to create 20 different amino acids. DNA-to-music programs, like Algorithmic Arts' Bankstep, more or less automatically translate each of these acids into musical notes, with the most commonly occurring acid becoming the middle "C" note (the center of a piano).
But the software's user decides the length of each note, which instruments will be used and the tempo of the overall tune. So a single DNA sequence can wind up sounding as different as two songs with the same chord progression, like Bob Marley's "Stir it Up" and The Troggs' "Wild Thing."
The Lysozyme C protein put to music by Algorithmic Arts founder John Dunn and his biologist wife, Mary Anne Clark, can be found here. They've also "sonified" DNA from vampire bats, slime molds, sea urchin and the human sex hormone.
Dunn hates the Maxygen proposal to copyright DNA as music.
"It's taking artistic copyright laws and using them to get around scientific issues," he said. "I think it stinks."
But a copyrighted genetic-based song could serve as a safe way to transfer DNA sequences between scientists, according to Don Pelto, an intellectual property lawyer with Washington firm McKenna Cuneo.
"You would purchase the encoded music from a biotech company," Pelto said. "If someone else bootlegged that file and subsequently decoded it to find the underlying DNA, there might be some intellectual property protection."
Current regulations discourage this type of sharing, Maxygen's Stemmer said. To get a patent on a DNA sequence, a company needs to first show that the sequence has a distinct medical or research function. Biotech firms often keep DNA sequences to themselves until they can come up with such reasons.
Stemmer admits that copyrighting DNA songs is a peculiar way to protect companies' interest in genetic sequences.
"Clearly, there is a certain amount of whimsy in this proposal," Stemmer wrote in a recent issue of Nature Biotechnology. "But there are also more than a few quanta of genuine intent that this approach, or a similar one, may set the industry back on a (pardon the pun) less-dissonant course."
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 AIM: KDean75206 Buffalo Activist Network http://www.buffaloactivist.net http://www.yaysoft.com
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