All Our Genes Are Belong To Us
Nothing so powerful as a bad idea whose time has come
posted over 11 years ago
If you want to monopolize a market, it makes a certain psychopathic sense to patent prior art at the expense of society at large.
The presence of BRCA1/2 gene mutations in a person's genome correlate strongly with future breast cancer. Myriad Corp., by virtue of broad patent claims on the naturally occurring gene itself , was the only entity that could test for BRCA.
$3000, please.
Myriad's patent exercise was so aggressive that it prevented ordinary academic and medical research. Those assholes had to go down and, in rare unanimity, the Supremes struck down the Myriad patent, US5747282 A (pdf).
The obvious danger in allowing a patent on a naturally occurring gene is that it 's a prologue to patenting a genome, which would allow commercial exercise over manifestations of the genome ... which is sometimes called slavery.
What makes it so egregious is that the lawsuit required a Supreme Court ruling (pdf) when any lay observation of prior art should have sufficed.
