Supreme Court Says No to Patenting Human Genes

Last June, just as I should have been finishing up with my class on intellectual property and the public domain, the Supreme Court ruled that companies may not patent the human genome. There is one exception though, if the company creates a man made gene then they might be able to patent that.  The words of the Supreme Court were “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.” 1 This is another great example of an argument between those who hold the patents and those who want to use the patented material. The company who made the patents, Myriad,  invested in locating these genes and was making  a lot of money from them. This was just good business.  However, the  case went to court, because doctors and patients were frustrated due to the fact that only the patent holders could use the genes.  They argued that this reduced the chances that there would be medical or any kind of scientific advancement using them. As John Koetsier says in his Venture Beat article “...that would curtail medical research and treatments as patent owners alone would have the right to create or licenses therapies resulting from knowledge of those genes — or to even study them.”

So this is a victory for those who don’t want genes patented and those who want more freedom to use information in general without the restrictions that come with intellectual property laws.  Even though there could be great profit for the companies making the patents, there is more to be gained by the public as a whole by allowing more people to use the information.  Had the genes remained patented, research on the genes would have become too expensive as royalties would have needed to have been paid for the genes the researchers were working on. I suspect the Supreme Court was able to come to a unanimous decision on this one in spite of the business angle because most of us are leery of having companies control something that is so essential to our humanity.  A quote from the Venture Beat article states it well, “Over the past 20 years, at least 41 percent of our genes have become the intellectual property of corporations,” genomics professors Christopher E. Mason and Jeffrey Rosenfeld said on the ACLU’s blog recently. “These patent claims contradict an intuitive sense that our DNA is no less ours than our lungs or kidneys.” It would seem only natural to have the human genome remain in the public domain.

Supreme Court: No, you may not patent human genes (VentureBeat)

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/13/supreme-court-no-you-may-not-copyright-human-genes/

Venture Beat Article