Month: June 2013

Charles Darwin, notes David Askew in a review of Paul Johnson’s Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, was not insensitive to the mores of his time:

Darwin’s mechanism [of natural selection] was self-regulating: it could explain the birth of new and the death of old species without having to turn to supernatural causes. It constituted a thorough rejection of the dominant natural theology of the day. Rather than publishing his ideas on the origin of species and the theory of natural selection, however, he sat on them – and maintained a public silence for two decades. This is not surprising. Evolution, [biographers Adrian] Desmond and [James] Moore remind us, was seen by the gentry to be “morally filthy and politically foul”, and Darwin himself acknowledged that to admit to the belief that species are mutable was akin to “confessing a murder”. Desmond and Moore also notice that he was happier “hunting with the urban gentry, rather than running with the radical hounds”.

Darwin did not seek publication until another researcher threatened to eclipse his own findings:

On June 18th, 1858, potential disaster struck. Another reader of [scholar T.R.] Malthus, Alfred Russel Wallace, submitted to Darwin a manuscript describing what Darwin thought was his theory of natural selection: “if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!” he moaned in a letter to Lyell. If published, it threatened to deprive him of any claim to originality. He turned to his friends for advice. Lyell proposed a joint publication of Wallace’s paper and extracts from Darwin’s work: both men would share the honour of priority. Darwin himself was reluctant to act dishonourably, but was persuaded that this was a gentlemanly solution. The papers were presented to the Linnean Society in July 1858, and met with silence: as Desmond and Moore say, “no fireworks exploded, only a damp squib”. …

Darwin became serious about publicising his theory: Wallace had finally goaded him into print. [On] The Origin [Of Species], an abstract of the ideas he had been pursuing at leisure, was published by John Murray in November 1859. In many ways the book marks the beginning of a new era in Western history. His ideas had been anathema in Victorian Britain but by the time he died were mainstream opinion: he had transformed long-accepted notions about nature and humanity. One of the remarkable aspects of the Origin is not only how revolutionary the work was, but how quickly its ideas about natural selection and evolution were accepted: here, we see a true paradigm shift. This acceptance is symbolised in the decision to bury the agnostic Darwin in Westminster Abbey.

SCOTUS ruled today that naturally occurring human genes can’t be patented. Lyle Denniston summarizes:

The Supreme Court long ago ruled that an inventor who discovers a phenomenon in nature, or figures out a “law of nature,” cannot get an exclusive right to use or sell that by obtaining a patent from the federal government.  Natural phenomena are the basic tools with which every would-be inventor starts, so locking up the right to use them in a monopoly held by a specific patent owner will frustrate others who might want to look for new ways to interpret that phenomena, the Court has said.

The exclusion of natural substances from eligibility for patents was the theory on which the Court relied Thursday in its unanimous ruling that a company cannot get a patent monopoly on the use and study of human genes that it isolates in the bloodstream, and then takes them out — without changing their natural character — for research.

In a later post, Denniston considers the real-world consequences of the case:

The decision was a major blow to a company that believed it had a right to be the sole user and analyst of two human genes, mutations in which show a high risk, for women found to have them in their blood, of breast and ovarian cancer.  But the ruling will give medical and scientific researchers, and family doctors, greater opportunity to help women patients discover their potential vulnerability to those types of cancer.

In a way, the ruling was a silent tribute to screen actress Angelina Jolie, who recently gained huge notoriety not for her acting but for voluntarily having her breasts surgically removed after discovering that she had the threatening mutations in her body.  She, of course, was able to pay the high cost of that test; now, women of less means will be able to afford it, and that was a key motivation for challenging Myriad’s patent rights.

McArdle frets that SCOTUS “just outlawed the business model of companies like Myriad,” which “spends about $50 million a year on R&D.” She wonders how best to encourage innovation going forward:

One way, of course, is to simply throw more federal money into research grants. Or we could investigate prizes: millions of dollars for anyone who identifies a gene that helps us target a specific disease process. The problem is with setting the value of the rewards—what constitutes a disease process worth targeting, and how do we know when we’ve found a worthwhile connection? Companies have an easy answer to that: “Someone will pay me to test for it.” Governments have to consult more nebulous standards. Investors may not be willing to waste money on those standards—or they may be too willing, because we’ve set the price too high. Or we may simply spend a lot of money on stuff that turns out to not be all that useful.

And, finally, Joshua Keating wonders whether other countries will follow the US’s lead:

In fact, Australia’s Federal Court ruled in favor of Myriad in February after a very similar suit was brought by a cancer foundation there. In that case, the justices ruled that “the two genes, isolated from their natural cells in which they were found, constituted a “manner of manufacture” and could therefore be patented.” That decision is currently being appealed and the government is considering legislation to limit genetic patents.

In Europe, the patentability of genetic materially is legally protected by the EU’s Biotech Directive, which holds that “biological material which is isolated from its natural environment or produced by means of a technical process” may be patentable “even if it previously occurred in nature.”

Earlier Dish on the case here.

Jesse Walker discusses his forthcoming book on conspiracy theories, The United States Of Paranoia:

A point I try to stress in the book is that even a conspiracy theory that says absolutely nothing true about the external world does say something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe it. One example that I mention in the book is the claim that white doctors were deliberately injecting black babies with AIDS. There’s no evidence for that. But while investigating that theory, you can’t stop there. You have to go on to ask, “Why did people believe this was true?”

And in fact, there is this long history of the secretive medical mistreatment of black people, which includes the Tuskegee experiment and all sorts of other things. There were these rumors about night doctors [who would supposedly secretly experiment on African Americans] and it’s really unclear to what extent those were true. Historians who look at this are very cautious, because it’s entirely possible that hospitals were seriously abusing the rights of people from the underclass. We’re trying to piece it together from such incomplete evidence that there’s always going to be question marks. There’s a spectrum that on one end has stuff that’s accepted as historical fact and on the other contains weird fantasies. But these aren’t completely separate categories because there’s this whole realm of possibilities in between.