John Sulston Quotes
If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.
Sulston, John E., and Georgina Ferry. The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome. Bantam Press, 2002.
This principle justified the Government in allowing a local Indonesian company to manufacture anti-AIDS drugs without paying licensing rates demanded by the drug companies that held the patents. The principle is that patent rights and the desire to profit should not supersede the rights of people to continue to live because they cannot afford the drugs to keep them alive. The local manufacturers provide the drugs to the government at cost of manufacture which is a tiny proportion of the price the patent owner charges.
Sir John Edward Sulston CH FRS MAE was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation of genetic technologies.
