Marks and Clerk news, the update of a major patent law firm, shows that even with regulatory barriers, stem cell research is taking off in the patent world – with many new patents. My research group argued in Who Owns Life that patents in stem cell research have already changed the entire nature of the bioethics debate for that field, and indeed it appears that the stem cell patenting field has taken off. In our essay in that book we reviewed all of the patent activity to date in human stem cell research and identified the basic problems with those patents. But we couldn’t have begun to anticipate this level of “progress.”

People assert claims to owning the embryo itself now, for all intents are purposes. If you thought gene patents were alarming, you ain’t seen nothing yet.