Here is potentially alarming news for those of us who are opposed to, or just wary of, patents and the disturbing tendency to grant an intellectual monopoly to an ever wider range of intellectual creations and thwart independent inventors who fail to reach the Patent Office first.

"Professor Sulston, who is based at the University of Manchester, said patenting would be"extremely damaging".

"I've read through some of these patents and the claims are very, very broad indeed," Professor Sulston told BBC News.

"I hope very much these patents won't be accepted because they would bring genetic engineering under the control of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). They would have a monopoly on a whole range of techniques."

Read the full story here.

Gordon Brown quits as British prime minister - read all about it here and here.

As my friends know, I'm an election junkie. Yet I'm not enamored with any of the three main parties - Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat - all of whom are distinguished by their scarcely concealed contempt for large sections of the electorate. That said, as a veteran observer of British general elections - this is the thirteenth that I have followed closely - I shall be watching the results online. If any readers are sufficiently interested in what is happening in the UK, I suggest you go here, here, here, and here to make some sense of what is a rather complicated story. And if anyone is interested in my prognostications, I'll stick to my hunch when the election was announced that the Tories - that's the Conservatives - will win an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons. Of course, as political theater, a hung Parliament would be more interesting. And, indeed, that is what the polls forecast.

As readers will be aware, the British general election campaign concludes with the poll on Thursday. Immigration is a key issue and one that touches on people's concerns about jobs and welfare and national identity.

What may strike American visitors in particular and foreign visitors in general is how so many members of ethnic minorities are thoroughly assimilated into British society. I suggest this truth comes through very clearly in this video about three black candidates, one from each of the three main parties: Chuka Umunna, Karen Hamilton, and Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones.

Although the minimum drinking age is twenty-one in the U.S., it is eighteen in the UK and generally speaking its scope does not extend to private homes so adults can provide alcoholic drinks to older children. However, as you might expect, the British authorities are stepping up the war on booze. Specifically, Britain’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recently attacked what it called the" culture of excessive drinking" in universities and colleges. In a report by Caroline Healy, the council called on vice-chancellors and college heads to withdraw funding for clubs and societies that organise boozy initiation ceremonies and drinking games.

Here Neil Davenport warns us against what he sees as"[a]n initiation into the culture of unfreedom" and concludes:

"The ACMD proposals to ban daft drinking games is the latest shot fired in the war against booze. Drinking and socialising has always been a key area of student life, and learning to negotiate the pleasures and pitfalls of both stands young people in good stead for a responsible adult life. By clamping down on such campus activities, officialdom sees personal autonomy and public freedom as necessary casualties in the war against drinking. In truth, the ongoing infantilisation of young people will store up far greater problems in the future than any amount of excessive campus drinking. If we want to see a robust return to adult values and behaviour, it's time officialdom called last orders on its out-of-control campaign to turn all of us into diet-cola-drinking 12-year-olds."

Fred Folvary explains that the so-called public option is not the only option.

Niall Ferguson calls for ridding British schools of junk history. And, of course, similar demands have been made about ridding U.S. schools of junk history. That said, Ferguson has his own conservative and statist agenda to sell."Professor Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, said he applauded some of Ferguson's ideas, such as teaching history in longer, chronological blocks. But Ferguson's language was condescending and the argument ideological, he added."

The British may recycle limbs but they are trailing the rest of the world when it comes to re-using pacemakers, dental implants and even body fat.

Discussing the British bombing of German cities during 1941-45, Leo McKinstry cites extensive archival evidence to rebut the official claim that"[t]he loss of life, which amounted to some 600,000 killed, was purely incidental."

"The British government has long denied that wartime air raids on German cities were intended to kill as many civilians as possible. In fact, the raids, led by Arthur Harris, were motivated largely by a desire to hit back and destroy indiscriminately."

"Far from being unfortunate or freak occurrences, [the raids on Hamburg and Dresden] represented the ultimate fruition of British air policy. Bomber Command's entire strategic offensive seems to have been based on the belief that the Nazi regime could be destroyed through wholesale, indiscriminate killing of Germany's urban population."

"Both during and after the war, the government maintained that it was never Britain's policy to carry out carpet bombing of civilian targets. 'We have always adhered firmly to the principle that we attack none but military objectives,' declared Archibald Sinclair, the secretary of state for air, in the Commons in October 1943. The mounting toll of civilian deaths was presented as a regrettable consequence of raids against factories, energy plants, transport networks or military installations, not as an end in itself.

"Even after victory was achieved, this unconvincing line was maintained. In one lecture, Charles Portal, the chief of the Air Staff for most of the war, said that it was 'a curious and widespread fallacy that our bombing of the German cities was really intended to kill and frighten Germans and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry. Any such idea is completely and utterly false. The loss of life, which amounted to some 600,000 killed, was purely incidental.' But as a study of wartime archives demonstrates, both Sinclair and Portal were being dishonest with the public. Urban destruction through 'concentrating bomb-loads on the densest and most vulnerable areas of cities', to quote one Air Staff paper, was the primary goal of Brit­ain's air offensive over Germany."