Supreme Court Gene Patents Ruling Opens Genetic Test Options

vinces99 writes "The Supreme Court's unanimous decision to bar the patenting of naturally occurring genes opens up important clinical testing options for a variety of diseases, which University of Washington medical geneticists and laboratory medicine experts say will benefit patients. Mary-Claire King, a UW geneticist who was instrumental in identifying the breast cancer-causing genes at the heart of the court case, hailed the ruling as 'a victory for patients, their families, their physicians and common sense.' She noted that within 24 hours after the decision was announced on June 13, UW Laboratory Medicine was offering tests for all known breast cancer genes."

Re:It is a hopeful, small step in the right direct

[interkin3tic]

The fact that the supreme court said genomic DNA was not patentable but cDNA was means that the issue isn't resolved, but momentum is on the side of sanity. Had the supreme court said "No, neither are patentable because you didn't fucking make those sequences, and cDNA is just genomic DNA with parts taken out," then the issue would have been resolved, which would have been good, but we couldn't say "See, IP laws are holding back cancer research and are STILL not fixed."

Perhaps the SC's incompetence to realize that reverse transcriptase is a naturally occouring enzyme, and viruses make cDNA all the time, and your cells remove introns all the time, so there is absofuckinglutely nothing patentable about cDNA... perhaps that will actually be useful in the larger battle.