I've been sort of amazed ever since I heard about NFTs from Planet Money and now the New York Times. Basically you associate a place on the blockchain with an image that you create. The New York Times created an article about NFTs and then took a screen shot of the article, and then sold that image of the article.
I went back to thinking... you know what is not own-able? A gene. The Supreme Court decided this several years ago after a company Myriad Genetics tried to patent a gene. They discovered a gene BRCA1 and another gene BRCA2 as strong indicators for breast cancer. They quickly patented the genes so that no one else was allowed to use the genes to detect breast cancer predisposition. In essence they stated that they owned this naturally occurring gene. Several years later, the case was brought to the Supreme Court of the United States and it was semi-unanimously struck down. Only one dissent from one justice on one clause.
I thought, Wouldn't it be hilarious if I put a gene on the NFT market? I took to PowerPoint to start overlaying images: The depiction of the gene in my favorite gene viewer Apollo; The 3D drawings of the full gene product from the Protein Databank, in both ribbon and cartoon visuals; three important statements from the court case; and to top it off, a watermark double helix DNA as the background.
I went to a website Rarible and put Ethereum cryptocoins into my wallet and probably spent about $38 in that currency to list it here: https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:923978:0x4c3ed84f3798c46b410c7551e77664c17e685068
So there you have it. You too can own (a picture of) BRCA1!
