Mediawingnuts' "most ridiculous item of the day"!!

I didn't plan on blogging anything today -- a combination of depression and ... well, age, I suppose.

But then, I happened to be reading the August issue of Reader's Digest on my favorite stool in a small room towards the back of the house and ... well, my depression is gone, but I'm angry as Hell!

Did any of you know -- who happen not to have read the latest Reader's Digest -- that of the 24,000 or so genes in your body, 4,000 or so are patented? That's right! Patented!! That means that an enterprising scientist at some university can't continue his or her research towards curing cancer or AIDS or what-have-you until he or she (or his or her university) pays the corporation who owns the patent on the gene that the scientist is studying or using ... lots of money.

Someone (my brother from Connecticut, I believe) once asked me how Democrats and Republicans differed. Are Republicans inherently evil and Democrats inherently good, for example? Of course not, that's certainly not true ... but I would venture to say that Republicans are geared towards watching out for the biotech corporations who own the patents on roughly a sixth (as of today) of your very genes, and Democrats (in general) are watching out for the lowly downtrodden scientist who has to stop his research because he stumbled onto a patented human gene in the vital work for which he hasn't the money to pay the greedy biotech firm who yes, happened to discover the gene first.

That's worse than any of that O'Reilly buffoon's most ridiculous items that he rants about and it's laid out as plain as the pimples on my face were 45 years ago ... in the Reader's Digest.

An example is worth quoting: "Gene patents give their owners property rights over gene sequences--for example in a diagnostic test for the efficiency of a new drug, or in the production of therapeutic proteins."

As a scientist, I am offended that nature itself can be "owned" by corporations! As a progressive liberal, I ask my Congressmen and women (both of my Senators and my Governor happen to be women) to get busy and write legislation that stops this outrageous situation. Migod, my wife and I were the first to have known she was pregnant a few times -- do we own the patents on our children? How obscenely outrageous! (The title of the RD article was "That's outrageous!") Congratulations, Reader's Digest, for being willing to take on the corporations who are rapidly taking ownership of the very earth.

I discovered a silly little (but here-to-fore unknown) relationship among the various residue versus non-residue classes of specific orders of composite numbers -- maybe I can own the numbers ... or even the "bits" that make up the numbers and other characters in computers worldwide. Of course, I'll have to race to the patent office on that, I suppose, and hope I beat some enterprising blogger. Migod, am I a Satanic corporatist deep down? That is, am I a damned Republican?

If you want someone tangible to hate ... or to spew your venom towards, let me add this: Half of the 4,000 human genes that are patented have their patent assigned by Incyte (they sure incited me!), a corporation in Palo Alto, California.

Lord love a duck ...