Italian Biotech Law Conference 2007

This year the topic of the Italian Biotech Law Conference 2007 was "ownership of bioinformation", a very thorny issue. The conference turned out to be very interesting. It was, unfortunately, too short and perhaps badly timed, as most people at IFOM seemed to be thinking more about the Easter break than research. Having said this, I probably learnt much more than I contributed, since all the papers were very insightful.

In my own contribution, I argued that, ultimately, genes are literally information (although a procedural kind of it) and that this interpretation allows one to unify, in a single approach to informational realism, both physics and biology. Basically, it makes a lot of sense to adopt a level of abstraction at which all processes, properties and entities, no matter whether just physical or also biological, are ultimately made of information.

The previous thesis can be summarised through a slogan: in biology, the medium is the message.

Linguistically, this means supporting the view that attributive uses of "biological" in "biological information" (biological information is information about biological facts) are based on predicative uses of "biological" (biological information is information whose intrinsic nature is biological, in the same sense in which digital information is not information about something digital but information whose nature is digital).

The consequence of this priority of the predicative over the attributive is that, if genes are (a kind of) information, then ownership of someone's genes is metaphorically reducible to a form of kidnapping or slavery. What is at stake is not so much privacy, then, but something even more fundamental: personal identity and integrity, and freedom.