Did you hear that the US Supreme Court ruled against being able to patent genes?

I had not heard until now – but this is great news!

I think its overall great news, but I can see a big downside. The inability to get a monopoly on a certain gene will reduce profits, which in turn will reduce the incentive to engage in costly research; lower ROI will slow innovation.

Woo hoo! They finally did something right!

@jerv Not really. They can still patent the process, and any synthetic genes that they create. But they cannot, and should never have been able to, patent something that naturally occurs and they simply found. It’s like saying Ben Franklin should have been able to patent electricity. The medical field is already flooded with perfectly well-patented techniques for a huge variety of medical tests. Myriad was alone in actually patenting the target of the test, and not the test itself. It was a perversion of the patent system and never should have occurred, and you’ll notice no one else attempted it in the meanwhile. Biotech is doing just fine without this. What this will do is now allow competition for the tests. If Myriad actually wants to create a superior test and patent that, they’re absolutely free to. But they should never have been allowed to simply dissallow competition this way.

I am so very glad.

yes – jsut heard it on NPR. Thank goodness for something.

It’s the difference between discovering something and inventing something. It seems to be a good ruling which I would support. It will make it more difficult to recover investment costs but still consistent with past practices. As we advance the lines become blurred but there doesn’t seem to be anything new in this ruling, just restating the rules in a complex environment.

@BhacSsylan There are those out there that would try to patent electricity and then sue Mother Nature for infringement.

@jerv absolutely, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing for buisness that one can’t

Excellent!

Now it’s fair that Europeans don’t charge American airplanes for using gravity discovered by Newton and Einstein.

What nature creates must remain free. Only human inventions can be patented.

@mattbrowne i like your response.. but what if they altered the gene/gnome in a way to make it unique…

an extreme example: the ability to instantly heal oneself?

@Xilas – I have no problem with patenting medication for gene therapy approaches and such.

@Xilas The ruling specified that sufficiently modified genes are perfectly patentable. It is only unaltered genes that are not.