Controversial U.S. Bill Would Lift Supreme Court Ban on Patenting Human Genes
By Kelly Servick,
Science
| 06. 04. 2019
A congressional proposal that would overturn a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that barred the patenting of human genes and ease other restrictions on patenting software and biomedical inventions is drawing fierce criticism from some scientific societies and patient advocates. Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Washington, D.C., along with more than 100 other signatories from research institutes and advocacy groups, released a letter to lawmakers arguing the changes would stifle medical research and hinder patients’ access to diagnostic tests.
The draft bill “would result in a quagmire of patent claims and legal impediments to the normal scientific exchange,” said Harold Varmus, a cancer biologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and former director of the National Cancer Institute, in a press conference yesterday. “It’s in the interest of virtually everyone to keep ideas and basic discoveries about the laws and products of nature in the public domain.”
The ACLU letter comes as the Senate Committee on the Judiciary kicks off the first in a series of three hearings that will examine potential changes to U.S. patent law.... see more
Related Articles
By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker | 05.07.2020
Evelynn Hammonds, who chairs Harvard’s department of the history of science, has spent her career studying the intersection of race and disease. She wrote a history of New York City’s attempt, a century ago, to control diphtheria, and is currently...
By Tamsin Shaw, The New York Review of Books | 05.13.2020
America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a shocking lack of preparedness for public health emergencies. But it has also revealed what must be, for the aspiring strongman in the White House and his coterie, a more embarrassing fact:...
By Alison Motluk, HeyReprotech Newsletter | 05.12.2020
Genes from the virus that causes COVID-19 have been found in the semen of men who had the disease, according to a paper published last week in the journal JAMA Network Open. A previous study and a case report...
By Ronnie S. Stangler, Medium | 04.19.2020
Last night, I entered intimate personal health information into a database that can be accessed by anyone. This is not a decision that I made lightly. I shared my information with the Personal Genome Project(PGP) at Harvard Medical School....
