5 - The Gender Politics of Genetic Patenting

Summary

In 1997, the US biotechnology company Biocyte was granted a European patent for isolating and storing umbilical cord blood cells. Although later revoked by the European Patent Office, the Biocyte patent exemplified the way in which surplus value is generated from women's bodies in another manner to that discussed in the previous chapter, where the commercial value of cord blood lay primarily in the ‘service’ offered by private blood banks to expectant parents. But not all patents depend on female bodies, useful though the Biocyte example is in the context of this book – to mark the transition from female bodies to all bodies. All bodies are potentially feminised in the politics of patenting. The ‘sex’ of the DNA involved is irrelevant to the process of patenting, even though some of the most prominent patenting cases have concerned female tissue. The 1994 Relaxin case, for example, involved a patent on a DNA sequence generated from a polypeptide hormone secreted by the corpus luteum in pregnant women. Objections to the patent, however, such as the challenge unsuccessfully mounted by the German Green Party, had nothing to do with protecting women as a group, but rather with the general ‘human right to self-determination’.

By 2005, the number of patented human genes had increased to 4,270, representing 18 per cent of the entire human genome.