This is a scam. If anyone owns the patent rights to genes, it is their original Creator. The corporations do not derive any patent rights by simply tweaking the existing gene in a laboratory. The corporations are merely assuming ownership rights because they can; they already own the governments in effect and as a result control the legislative process.
Even if they found a way scientifically to create intelligent life from scratch, the concept of allowing such control or ownership over human life is unconscionable and constitutes a form of slavery. Anyone who supports such a state of affairs is by definition an enemy of free humanity and ought to be treated as such.
[W]henever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience." 
