EU Court Rules Against Stem Cell Patents For Research

LibRT writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Europe's highest court has ruled that stem cells from human embryos cannot be patented, in a case that could have major implications for medicine. ... The European Court of Justice said in a statement: 'The use of human embryos for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes which are applied to the human embryo and are useful to it is patentable. But their use for purposes of scientific research is not patentable.' It added: 'A process which involves removal of a stem cell from a human embryo at the blastocyst [early embryo] stage, entailing the destruction of that embryo, cannot be patented.'"