On April 10, 1970 President George Washington signed a bill that laid out the bases for our current American Patent System. It proclaimed that every inventor was entitled to patent protection as long as the inventor and the invention complied with the ordinance set by the United States Constitution. For one reason or another, society seems to have neglected parts of this declaration in our present time. With regard to Wil S. Hylton's "Who owns this body," Mark Dowie's "God's and Monsters," and Robert Winston's "Playing God" a reader can further understand how society has disregarded present regulations of the U.S. Patent Office and broken several amendments in the process.
An 1817 court ruling determined that nothing "injurious to the well-being, good policy, or good morals of society" (Dowie 49) shall ever be patented. Although today, American civilization has allowed the near complete opposite to occur, by permitting the patenting of cells. There is absolutely nothing moral or ethical about someone being able to own another person, even if it is only a microscopic portion. To argue patentability on the grounds of scientific advancement; is to rationalize .
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slavery on the grounds of it saving slaves from themselves. Being owned by someone, does not contribute to the betterment of a person in any way. Once society allows parts of the human to be patented, it becomes unclear exactly what makes a person human. If people's body composition is merely considered potential property, then what stops scientist from the whole person? At what point is it no longer just cells, but enough to thought of as a full person? The sheer idea sets humanity back a hundred years.
In the last century we have concluded that you can not have another human being as property. That was the idea of slavery, owning another person. We as a nation abolished that concept, "so you can't own a whole human being, but you can own all the parts" (Hylton 119).
