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EDITORIAL
Does Life Have A Dollar Value?
In recent years much has been accomplished in the areas
including genetic manipulation and the development of life in a
laboratory. In many cases, scientists who make these
discoveries have been praised by half of the population and
scorned by the other half.
Since each person has a slightly different opinion from the
next person, it is pointless to use this space to try and convince
you to support any opinion which differs from your own.
However, a startling decision in this field is a recent U.S.
Supreme Court decision. In October of this year, the Supreme
Court handed down a decision which granted patent rights to
any life forms. Therefore, developers now have not only patent
rights to the process, but patent rights to th e life form, itself.
Below is an article reprinted from The Washington Post which
summarizes the Court’s decision.
By Bill Richards
Washington Post Staff Writer
A federal patent appeals court ruled yesterday that an
industry can patent and own certain forms of life it develops.
The cautious decision could have sweeping effects on the
scientific and business communities.
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals
allows the Upjohn Co., the pharmaceutical manufacturer in
Kalamazoo, Mich., to patent a type of microorganism known as
streptomyces vellosus that the company uses to produce an
antibiotic called lincomycin.
The court s 3-to-2 ruling in favor of Upjohn opens the way for
a broad spectrum of food and drug manufacturers who work
with microorganisms to claim new forms of life they develop as
their own.
The ruling could also affect scientists seeking to develop new
types of life in the laboratory by tinkering with DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid), one of the basic building blocks of life.
Some scientists and politicians have expressed fears that DNA
research may create genetic monstrosities or new diseases, but
others see the research as an opportunity to produce new forms
of drugs and food plants.
Before yesterday’s decision the only forms of life which could
patented were certain plants and seeds which faU under the
federal Plant Patent Act of 1930.
All other requrests by industries to patent life forms they
develop had been rejected by patent officials as not conforming
to the patent law categories. The categories aredefined in the
law as “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture or
thS^’’*”" improvement
In deciding yesterday, the appeals court rejected the
argument of a lower patent board that since microorganisms
are alive they cannot conform to the agency’s legal categories.
Pr^ent Upjohn and other companies place newly
developed strains of microorganisms into a “bank” where anv
other firm can withdraw them and use them if it wishes
Micrwrganisms have come to be important tools in the
therTi?’ the pharmaceutical branch
^ ^ ® useful tangible
ndustnal tool is invented...we do not see any reason to deprive
The court caUed “far-fetched” fears exoresseH hv th.
patent board that its ruling could open up patent attemots for
new and^eful species of plants, animals and insects created
by man But the ruling did not totaUy rule out such ^fents
The Upjohn attorney noted howpvpr fhot
leliberatelv raiitiniic i the court took a
'/3/I977;
Failures Of The System
(Continued from page 1)
When neighbors committed
minor offenses, the courts had
recourse to fines or to the
whip, or, more commonly, to
shaming the offender by
displaying him in the stocks.
The local jails served only the
purpose of detaining those
charged with a crime until
time of trial.
The colonists, as tough-
minded Calvinists, did not an
ticipate the reformation of the
criminal or the eradication of
crime. And they understood,
too, how limited their powers
were: if a whipping did not
deter the offender, there was
little they could do, little, that
is, except have recourse to
the gallows. The result was an
unbalanced system,
vacillating between harsh and
mild punishments.
Such procedures could not
survive the growth of cities,
or the rise in the number of
immigrants, and the frequen
cy of migrations westward in
the arly 19th Century. With
the insularity of the com
munity destroyed, and with
Enlightenment and
republican ideology making
capital punishment seem a
barbaric remnant of a cruder
age, some kind of new sanc
tions would have to be
created.
REFORM AND
REHABILITATION
That the alternative
became the penitentiary
reflects the very special
outlook of its founders, the
Jacksonian reformers of the
1820s and 1830s. These in
novators shared grandiose
ambitions, they would not
merely deter but eliminate
crime; they would not punish
but reform the criminal. The
Jacksonians were the first to
announce the theme that
would persist to our own day:
prisons should be places of
rehabilitation.
These reformers were at
once optimistic about the per-
fectability of man and
pessimistic about the ability
of a democratic society to
cohere. Criminal behavior,
they reasoned, reflected the
faulty organization of society.
Judging their own cities by
exaggerated notions of the
stability of colonial towns,
they saw the easy morals of
the theaters and saloons
replacing the authority of the
family and the church.
To counter what they took
to be this rampant disorder,
they invented the peniten
tiary. It was to be a model,
almost utopian community
that would both inspire the
society and, at the same time,
instill habits of obedience and
regularity in its inmates.
From these notions the
COURSES BY NEWSPAPER
penitentiary took its first
form. To isolate the inmate
from all contaminating in
fluences, prisons were not
only located at a distance
from the cities, with visits
and mail discouraged, but
prisoners, living one to a cell,
were under strict rules of
silence. A bell-ringing pun-
tuality prevailed. At the
sound of a gong, inmates mar
ched in lock step to work, then
to eat, and then returned to
their isolation.
As acute an observer as
Alexis de Tocqueville con
cluded: “The regularity of a
uniform life...produces a deep
impression on his mind.” If
the inmate was not released
an honest man, at the least
“he has contracted honest
habits.”
FAILURE OF THE SYSTEM
It did not take long,
however, for the good order of
the prisons to degenerate. By
the 1850s, even more clearly
by the 1880s, the institutions
became overcrowded, brutal,
and corrupting places. State
investigations uncove-ed
countless examples of
inhumane treatment -
prisoners hung by their thum
bs or stretched out on the
rack. Clearly , incarceration
was not reforming the
deviant, let along eradicating
crime.
And yet, the system per
sisted. Part of the reason may
reflect the seeming prac
ticality of confinement; at
least for a time the in
capacitation of the offender
protected society. Further,
the prisons were filled with
immigrants (first with Irish,
later Eastern Europeans, still
later the blacks). The con
finement of a group that was
both “alien’ and “deviant”
seemed appropriate, no
matter how unsatisfactory
prison conditions were.
NEW REFORMS
But such functional con
siderations were not as cen-
tral to the continuing
legitimacy of incarceration as
the persistence of reformers’
hopes that prisons could
rehabilitate the offender.
Each successive generation of
well-intentioned citizens set
out to upgrade the pen-
tentiary. Hie problem was
not with the idea of in
carceration but with its im
plementation.
Thus, the Progressives in
the period 1900-1920 tried to
Calendar
whole newdirec«,„..SKrj “ ™“|8. “It’s a step in a
From the Washington Post, Friday, Oct. 7,1977
Warren Carrier 7-30 pm ^'‘®s®nts: Dr.
WFnNP^A V ^ ^*^«"ville; Election Day.
Building, all day- S LiSh
WorksholpSeSs P-m.; CCC:
BSg,^S^dIy.^cS-^Sh Campus: Student Union
“normaUze” the pn,,
vironment. Thev
the rules of suL ?
step, and the striped,?','
and looked instead to fre*
?choir?„rv::a
In the 1920s and i|
' psychologists urge/,
adoption of J
sophisticated system
classification so thatpris.,
could be counseled on ai
Jvidual basis. Newnioj,
toerapy would readjust i
deviant to his environmeml
Both groups of reton
welcomed the indetenjj
sentence and parole, Hat
than have a judge passaf
■ sentence at time of trial
offender should enter a pB
as a patient would e
hospital. When he was
not before and not laii
would be released.
Again and again,
translation of these
into practice was
pointing. No matter howfe
the effort, prisons coii
become normal cominniiiK
Classification schemes is
not well implemented; pi
became a guessing J
anything but scientific or
in its decisions.
Nevertheless, each Hi
prison riot occurred
another example .of bniti
was uncovered, refoii
insisted that the fault lay t
the poor administrationoii
system, not with the m
itself. Eager to do
determined to rehabilitate!
deviant, they continued tit
to transform the prison i
place of reformation.
NEW GOALS I
Beginning in the mid-1
a new generation of refomil
began to question theft
idea of incarceration. Fori
first time, well-inten»
observers began to woe
whether the basic concepi
the prison was faulty.
reformers were frank alK
their inability to undersli
»the roots of deviancyoti
rehabilitate the deviant.
Armed with so few ansu
and suspicious of inhei
truths, they contended tlj
punishment should aim,n(l|
do good, but to reduce liaii
that a system of sancSj
should abandon gran*
goals and try to aoid misclij'
Perhaps fixed sentences!
short duration to the avofj
goal of punishing the crimij
would create a more just n
(Continued on page 3)
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