Tony Mokbel might have been more convincing with a real hair wig instead of the terrible toupee he was wearing when he was caught. Incidentally, it was being auctioned on E-Bay.

I have been thinking further and there must be some kind of exception for hair. Otherwise how can people get hair extensions? I’m sure hair extensions are real hair.

Oanh: very interesting point! If you took a hair follicle, then you would be able to extract DNA from it, because the follicle is a cell containing DNA. If you cut the hair above the follicle, you would not be able to get information about the DNA.

But you can still get a lot of information out of cut hair. A recent analysis of a lock of Beethoven’s hair, discovered that he probably suffered from plumbism or lead poisoning.

So: definitely privacy issues there. What if a hairdresser stole a lock of hair from a celebrity, and sold it to the paparazzi who then analysed it and tried to establish whether that celebrity took drugs? Perhaps that’s better off being dealt with by privacy laws.

Bruce: I like the idea of limiting patents over genetic sequences. The cell line issue is an interesting one, isn’t it? One of the issues in the case was the fact that the cells were harmful and therefore they had to be excised from Moore to save his life. The cells are cultivated merely to produce a particular protein, and could not develop into an independent living organism. In fact, they would die unless the scientists kept culturing them. Also raises interesting questions of what “living” means.

Don’t know how I’d go about explaining a cancerous growth though… It’s novel, but novel in the context I was thinking was of a genotypic novelty for the whole organism, rather than a growth.

I thought this might interest you:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,,2123009,00.html

Almost the plot for a horror movie.

Therefore even the sale of human hair or fingernails would not be legal in this State, unless a Minister was prepared to licence someone to purchase hair.

Are we discriminating against chemo/alopecia patients and condemning them to spot-them-a-mile-off rugs?
Does the EU charter (not enforceable, but the Nordics are usually ahead of the game) explain the unfortunate Finnish Trade Minister, Mauri Pekkarinen?

It worries me that companies might seek to patent people’s DNA and use the patent to monopolise the pharmaceutical benefits which might be derived from it. Sound neurotic and far-fetched?

I’ll cut and paste from a response back on my original post:

Well, assuming your DNA is pretty close to everyone else’s, the Darth Ventners of this world - and the others who are just pillaging the results of the Human Genome Project - already have. What I particularly object to here is the pathetic way patents are being issued for sequences and the proteins that are derived from them when the pirates don’t even know what they do. If anything is the common property of all humanity, it’s our DNA sequences.

Anyway, patents are supposed to be for inventions, not discoveries.

And as for stupid patents: you’ve heard about how a Melbourne lawyer was awarded an “Australian Innovation Patent” for the wheel (actually a “Circular Transportation Facilitation Device”).