The patentability of genes is thus only one piece of a much broader debate about who will own and control the torrents of information that we have recently begun to extract from the most free, fecund, competitive, dynamic, intelligent, and valuable repository of know-how on the planet—life itself. That the private sector is already actively engaged in the extraction and analysis is a promising sign, but getting it fully engaged will require robust intellectual property rights, framed for a unique environment in which every fundamentally new invention must be anchored in a new understanding of some aspect of molecular biology. Individual gene patents are out of the picture now, but other forms of intellectual property already provide some protection. We should reaffirm and expand them. And we should view Washington’s plans to take charge instead for what they are: the most ambitious attempt to control the flow of information that the world has ever seen.

Drug companies began systematically exploring the molecular mechanics of diseases more than 30 years ago. Sometimes a gene itself is the essence of the cure. The insulin used by diabetics was extracted from pigs and cows until Genentech and Eli Lilly inserted the human insulin gene into a bacterium and brought “humulin” to market in 1982. Other therapies use viruses to insert into the patient’s cells a gene that codes for a healthy form of a flawed or missing protein. Recent “cancer immunotherapy” trials have shown great promise: the patient is treated with his or her own immune-system cells, genetically modified to induce them to attack their cancerous siblings. More often, a drug is designed to target a protein associated with a specific gene. …