On Sunday Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, and others wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times describing the absurdity of our current patent system.

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you…Do you want to be told by your doctor, "Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?"

If that weren’t crazy enough, Crichton describes how our courts are being used as Idea Police. A case before the Supreme Court, LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories, revolves around who owns ideas.

[T]he 13th claim of the patent is more general: it covers a way of determining vitamin deficiency by first testing blood or urine for homocysteine by any means and then correlating elevated levels with a vitamin deficiency.

What the court is deciding is not whether a company can patent a new test, that’s not at issue it’s about whether a company can patent the idea of the results of that test.

But Crichton ends with this chilling thought:

It means nobody can write a dinosaur story because my patent includes 257 items covering all aspects of behavior, like item No. 13, "Dinosaurs attack humans and other dinosaurs."

That’s right. Crichton was convinced by the Hollywood Cartels to patent the ideas in Jurassic Park. Now every child in school that dreams about dinosaurs is facing a patent infringement suit. And if we know anything it’s that the Hollywood Cartels love to sue children.