Inside the lawsuit that ended US gene patenting
By Heidi Ledford,
Nature
| 10. 25. 2021
Not so long ago, if you asked someone about the US Patent and Trademark Office’s practice of granting patents on human genes, you’d probably get one of two responses. Biotechnology insiders would shrug — such patents had been standard practice for decades. They were considered a linchpin of the burgeoning genetic-testing industry. Those less intimate with the inner workings of biotech often had a different reaction: “But that’s just … wrong,” said lawyer Chris Hansen. “Who can we sue?”
In 2009, Hansen, a veteran of civil-rights cases at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York City, embarked on a lawsuit that ended gene patenting in the United States. The effort seemed doomed, yet Hansen went on to win at the US Supreme Court, challenging the very idea of what patents are and what they should do.
The unexpected twists and turns of that case — as well as its impact on medicine, and particularly on the lives of women affected by breast and ovarian cancer — are ably and affectingly detailed in The Genome Defense. Its author...
Related Articles
By Pallab Gosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News | 06.26.2025
Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first.
The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to...
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists...
By Ron Leuty, San Francisco Business Times | 06.16.2025
23andMe's two-step sale to a nonprofit led by former CEO Anne Wojcicki is nothing more than a dance around California's genetic privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a filing late Monday, one day before a judge will...
By Ed Cara, Gizmodo | 06.22.2025
In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined...