Terminator(TM) technology, and more recently with http://www.TransContainer.wur.nl described as “Developing efficient and stable biological containment systems for genetically modified plants.”

http://Grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=198

Profit requires dependence. The consumer must be dependent upon the source owners. Wage has no such requirement.

if you’re trying to invent a language for programming DNA, having a proprietary language seems stupid.

Stupid? You think profiteers are stupid to make something proprietary? Clever; vicious; insideous; dangerous; yes, but not stupid.

“If Oxford University had supported privatization of the English language hundreds of years ago, the dictionary they made wouldn’t have been so useful.”

Profiteering corporations don’t want products to be useful. Usefulness is bad for profit because the consumer becomes more “set up”. A profiteer wants a consumer to believe the product is useful so it will be purchased, but after that the product should be “self destructing” or limited by time or in other ways so the dependence remains.

“there are wonderful companies that have locked up most of the relevant intellectual property around how to engineer proteins to bind DNA. The products that they can deliver are going to be measured in small positive integer numbers, a few diseases.”

All the better to subjugate you with, my dear.

“But, the real value associated with being able to engineer proteins that bind DNA are in the uncountable applications people could use the proteins for.”

Value? BWA-HA-HA-ha-ha! You think abundance is value? Abundance is WORTHLESS to a profiteer. In fact, it is worse than that, abundance is INVERSELY related to profit. As abundance increases, the potential for profit decreases. Profit for some measures the poverty of others.

“It’s like a programming language where it would be a big downstream economic cost if you owned “if/then” and you were the only person who could use it.”

Sure it is a cost for everyone except the profiteering source owners. That proves profit is an externality for the consumers that suffer it. It is a measure of their dependence; a plea for growth.

Profit is not needed by a society, it show how far we are from having the sources of production fully distributed. This is easily solved by treating all price above cost as an investment from the consumer that paid it.

Until we organize in a manner that respects a consumer’s pleading, the ignorantly divisive profiteers will continue to murder/delete all useful species while replacing them with those that will guarantee dependence to insure profit remains.