I think that patents causing research/testing/treatment of human disease to be expensive or impossible are morally wrong.
The real problem is (or will be, when this actually comes to the courts) is that it’s hard to draw a line saying what can or cannot be patented, biologically. Lines get very blurry when you’re talking about genes vs. gene products vs. regulatory sequences of genes… I’m not sure the article Marina linked really got it when they said that “misinterpretation” of Supreme Court rulings made this possible. Biological matter can legally be patented so long as it’s been modified or purified or if the gene product/function was know. Therefore, animal genes are able to be patented if you discover what they do, and humans are animals. Before the human genome was sequenced, this mostly wasn’t a big deal (in terms of human medicine, anyway).
So if we want to regulate the patenting of genes, there is a huge host of questions that follow in trying to parse out what is necessary to “protect.” Are animal genes still fair game even though you’ll be able to find homologues of every human gene you want? Would you not be able to patent a primer that you invented if someone finds that exact sequence in the human genome? (Which is not a long shot, by the way, with 6 billion DNA base pairs in one human’s genome.) Will only coding regions be out-of-bounds for patenting? If so, what about regulatory sequences, which have been shown to be even more important in many cases? The list goes on.
Basically it’s going to be nearly impossible to flesh out a good set of rules that enforce what we might be able to morally say is “the right thing.” Any laws that are made, there will be a loophole in the language and someone will figure out a way to make a really big, immoral buck on someone else’s unfortunate combination of genes…