This is Planet Money from NPR.

For four decades, Chris Hanson worked as a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union,

the ACLU, arguing big cases on things like internet censorship and school desegregation.

I love to see people who've done wrong.

I love to write wrongs through litigation.

Oh man, that's a good feeling.

Chris's job was to be on the lookout for new kinds of civil rights violations, and to figure

out a legal strategy to fight back against them.

I used to tell people I'd go in in the morning and read the paper and see what new outrage

was going on around the country to get those people away to deal with it.

But one day back in the fall of 2005, Chris gets his news hand-delivered.

The ACLU science advisor pops her head into his office with an entirely different kind

of issue than the kind he usually deals with.

She tells him, I think I found you a new outrage, Chris.

Chris are turning DNA like our genetic material into intellectual property.

She said to me, you know that genes are patent, and I said patronizingly, oh, you mean

that the methods by which the gene is extracted is patent?

She said no, the human gene itself is patent.

Chris is like, wait, you're telling me that the United States government is letting companies

claim that my genetic material, everyone's genes, are their intellectual property, and

then they're making money off of it?

Patents are supposed to be for inventions.

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