by Seth Shulman

About the author: Seth Shulman frequently writes about intellectual property issues. His books include Owning the Future (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

Who owns the human genome? A profound confusion reigns today over the issue of proprietary rights to human genes, and it is setting the stage for a long- term intellectual-property disaster. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, backlogged with tens of thousands of private claims to genetic information, cannot seem to decide where to draw the line on ownership rights; animosity between government-funded genome researchers and their industry counterparts continues to mount; and an ominous tangle of lawsuits already looms on the horizon.

And this, as everyone in the field will tell you, is only the beginning of many decades of fast-paced genomic research.

The controversy was simmering just behind the happy...