In Australia, Gene Patents Also Subject of High Court Struggle
By Leigh Dayton,
Science
| 04. 19. 2013
The U.S. Supreme Court isn't the only high court considering a precedent-setting case on patenting human genes. Australia's Full Federal Court this week began proceedings in an appeal of an earlier decision that upheld the validity of breast cancer diagnostic tests developed by Myriad Genetics—the same tests that were the subject of
oral argument before the U.S. high court earlier this week.The Australian legal jousting comes as that nation's policymakers pursue a trio of initiatives that could have far-reaching implications for how Australia handles biomedical patents, including those on human genes. On 2 April, a draft report on pharmaceutical patents that calls for limiting the reach of intellectual property (IP) was unveiled. On 5 April, the government released an independent government review of health and medical research that argues for allowing human gene patents. And on 15 April, a new law that updates the country's patent system came into effect, but it mostly sidesteps the gene patenting issue.
Amid this flurry of activity, many eyes are on the court case, which focuses on the validity of patents held by...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Deni Ellis Béchard, The Washington Post | 10.07.2025
In 1949, when John Gurdon was a 16-year-old boarding school student at Eton College in England, his teacher described his biology studies as “disastrous” and his scientific ambitions as “ridiculous.”
“If he can’t learn simple biological facts,” his term report...