[SJSAMPLE]

Thanks.
I've been a Crichton fan since I read "The Andromeda Strain" at age ten. He has an amazing grasp of the politics of science and the resulting failures.

I now recall the patent/genome hubub of the early 1990s but hadn't followed it much.

I can't understand how something that's discovered can be patented. Patent the process that's used to discover it? Definitely. But something that already exists should not be patented. It existed before the discovering process and would have existed without that process.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I can't understand how something that's discovered can be patented.

Affirmative action in the USPTO at work for you.