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22 B. C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 267 (1994-1995)
Patenting Life: Biotechnology, Intellectual Property, and Environmental Ethics

handle is hein.journals/bcenv22 and id is 277 raw text is: PATENTING LIFE: BIOTECHNOLOGY, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Ned Hettinger* I. INTRODUCTION Human beings must determine an appropriate relationship to the earth and live accordingly. This task is more important now than ever before. Nonhuman forms of life and nonhumanized habitats are dis- appearing fast. The rate of anthropogenic species extinction is hun- dreds-perhaps thousands-of times greater than normal back- ground extinction rates, resulting in a possible loss of one-quarter of all species on earth within fifty years.' One eminent scientist suggests that we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.'2 Our species, Homo sapiens, one species among millions of others,3 now appropriates between twenty and forty per- * Associate Professor of Philosophy, College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C., e-mail, Hettin- gerN@CofC.edu; B.A. 1974 Denison University; Ph.D. 1985 University of Colorado at Boulder The author thanks Karen Burnett, Gary Comstock, Pete Hinckley, Dale Jamieson, and David Kline for stimulating comments and criticisms. The author benefited greatly from discussions of draft versions of this Article with philosophers at the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and with the participants at a Symposium on Ethics and Patenting of Transgenic Organisms sponsored by the National Agricultural Biotechnology Council and the Center for Biotechnology Policy and Ethics at Texas A&M University. 1 See EDWARD 0. WILSON, THE DIVERSITY OF LnFE 280 (1992); Paul R. Ehrlich & Edward 0. Wilson, Biodiversity Studies: Science and Policy, 253 SCIENCE, 758,760 (1991). 2 WILSON, supra note 1, at 280. There have been approximately a dozen mass extinctions chronicled in the fossil record. See NEIL CAMPBELL, BIOLoGY, 500 (2d ed. 1990). It typically has taken between 2 and 10 million years for the earth to rebuild its former diversity after major catastrophic extinctions. Homo sapiens are only about 250 thousand years old. For discussion, see Steven Jay Gould, The Golden Rule-A Proper Scale for our Environmental Crisis, NAT. HIST., Sept. 1990, at 24-30. 3 1A million species have been identified worldwide and estimates of total global species diversity range from 5 to 100 million. See William K. Stevens, Species Loss: Crisis of False Alarm?, N.Y. TMImEs, Aug. 20, 1991, at C1, C8.

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