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The question has been debated for years but not addressed directly by the U.S. Supreme Court—until this week. It came up for consideration on 15 April thanks to a coalition of clinicians, researchers, and legal activists who have waged a 4-year legal campaign to invalidate one company's patents on the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, used in diagnostic tests to estimate cancer risk. The challengers argue that human genes are "products of nature"—not inventions—and so cannot be patented. The defendant, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, argues that its patents are valid because they describe genes not as they occur in nature but as they exist after they have been "isolated" from tissue.
The oral argument in the case—Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc.—took the court deep into the territory of molecular biologists. For more than an hour, the justices quizzed the competing sides about exons, introns, and cDNAs, proposing several different metaphors in an effort to squeeze the complex biology into a manageable legal mold. At the end, it was clear that many of the...
The oral argument in the case—Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc.—took the court deep into the territory of molecular biologists. For more than an hour, the justices quizzed the competing sides about exons, introns, and cDNAs, proposing several different metaphors in an effort to squeeze the complex biology into a manageable legal mold. At the end, it was clear that many of the...