Kirukkalkal

Today morning, I was listening to a piece on NPR about how a hospital has dealt with an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who met with an accident and rendered brain dead... Hospital claims that it has spent more than a million USD and eventually rented a charter plane and deported him to his home country with a State Court's permission.... Of course, there are legal battles going on now (What do you expect, then?!?!) whether it is right or wrong.... For me, the bigger picture is - A 'well-developed', 'G-8' and a 'Superpower' seems to have trouble treating a single human being, citing the cost associated with it... So, USA cannot take care of a single human being because he doesn't have health insurance! I am not here to justify the immigration part or legality of the illegal immigrant's rights... There are of course millions of US citizens who can't afford health insurance. Is it really the people to be blamed for their ability (or inability) to

So much for 'categorizing' this under 'Fiction'!! To me, it didn't sound too far away from reality, looking at all the happenings around, these days.... Crichton attempts to extrapolate the gene patents and research in the medical field into a horror story (infact, it is a horror 'happening' and not a 'story'!). The author stuck only to the gene patenting in the medical field, but to me (should, for everybody else!), it is a reality check on the entire patenting business. I really don't understand what is patenting anymore (of course, I am just a layman in the technical terms, anyway)... Here is my understanding: You don't have to 'invent' something new to 'patent'. If you can invent 'something' that had not been patented 'already', then you can actually 'patent' it. Take for example the attempt to patent Basmati Rice by a Texas company Rice Tec (ooooh... Rice Technology!), when Kashmiri farmers have on