A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.

There is something fundamentally wrong with companies being able to own the rights to pieces of the human genome. Yet more than 20% of the human genetic code has been patented.

For the past 20 years, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been issuing patents on human genes -- the segments of DNA that we all have in our cells -- giving private corporations, individuals, and universities the exclusive rights to those genetic sequences, their usage, and their chemical composition. There is something fundamentally wrong with companies being able to own the rights to pieces of the human genome.

Watch the video and learn why it is important that we stop the government from allowing companies like Myriad to own our genes.