A case before the Supreme Court this week addresses the question of whether companies should be able to patent specific genes:
The biotech company Myriad Genetics is defending patents that give it exclusive control over two genes linked to breast cancer. Critics have argued that Myriad merely “snipped” the genes from the human genome, and that this no more deserves patent protection than “snipping” a leaf from a plant or removing a liver from a human body. … Justice Elena Kagan compared Myriad’s patent to finding a rare plant in the Amazon with medical properties. “It takes a lot of ingenuity and a lot of effort to actually find that plant, just as it takes a lot of effort and a lot of ingenuity to figure out where to snip on the genetic material. But are you saying that you could patent that plant because it takes a lot of effort and a lot of ingenuity to find it?”
Jerry Coyne views Myriad’s patent as “exploitative, greedy, and unfair”:
No company should own a gene, and this is an explicit violation of patent law, which argues that natural substances cannot be patented. … Yes, Myriad discovered that these genes were associated with cancer, and developed a way to assay mutations, but what should be patented is the diagnostic process, not the gene itself. Others can—and have, in the case of cystic fibrosis—developed and patented tests without patenting the gene, so several companies offer diagnosis for that gene.
The Dish 