Carl Zimmer, in a New York Times book review, says that in The Journey of Man, Spencer Wells skirts the issue of commercialization of the human genome.
I first learned about Wells' research in an email from a collegue. Wells, who does not look entirely unlike Indiana Jones, is a genetic scientist from Oxford who discovered the original Homo Sapien male. Adam, it turns out, is an African man whose descendants moved out into southern Asia, then Europe, and finally the New World. Adam's descendants were better hunters, travelers, fishermen, farmers and builders and soon replaced all other hominid species.
Today, drug companies, such as Well's employer, Genomics Collaborative, learn from various people's genes to make improvements to western medicine. Information that can be gleaned through genetic research however, is too important and too potentially powerful to entrust to private interests.
Genetic information must remain free to all who wish to see it - in a fundamentally understandable form. Of course when drugs or therapies are developed from that knowledge, those inventions should be rewarded by patentability. The genome itself, as well as the detailed differences within it, were discovered in nature, and so should not be patented.
