From anilg@iimahd.ernet.in Thu May 8 20:22:54 1997 Received: from mx4.u.washington.edu (mx4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.5]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.04/8.8.4+UW97.04) with ESMTP id UAA22936 for ; Thu, 8 May 1997 20:22:53 -0700 Received: from stdwww.iimahd.ernet.in (root@stdwww.iimahd.ernet.in [202.41.76.247]) by mx4.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW96.12/8.8.4+UW97.04) with SMTP id UAA12793 for ; Thu, 8 May 1997 20:22:30 -0700 Received: from iimahd.iimahd (iimahd [202.41.76.254]) by stdwww.iimahd.ernet.in (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id IAA09082 for ; Fri, 9 May 1997 08:56:36 +0500 Received: from anilg.iimahd by iimahd.iimahd (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA19760; Fri, 9 May 97 08:52:04+050 Date: Fri, 9 May 97 08:52:04+050 From: anilg@iimahd.ernet.in (Prof. Anil Gupta) To: patent-news@europe.std.com Subject: Re: PATNEWS: Gene sequences, ESTs, PTO, NIH; cloning patent protests Cc: consbio@u.washington.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <199705081702.AA29320@world.std.com> Just a small comment on Pat Mooney's fear that closing will pose a serious threat to animal diversity. Sure it does. But even bigger threat has been posed and for year by cross breeding program and lack of in situ conservation in tropical as well as other countries. How come that we always pick up potential threats for alarm and ignore the real and continuing threats as tolerable? Patenting of human ines is bad even if it helps in diagnostics of serious diseases and their control? It is like patents on herbal pestcides are bad because these involve plants, but chemical pesticides are ok because they benefit MNCs and destroy the environmnet in real time at global scale!!!!!! anil P.s. The mail from patnews is extremely interesting and colleagues shoudl read it carefully, notwithstanding above. The issues deserve urgent attention of every body concerned with keeping 'moral order' in our society. .