Stem Cell Patents Come Under Fire
By Associated Press,
Associated Press
| 07. 19. 2006
MILWAUKEE -- A consumer group, a patent foundation and a stem cell scientist are challenging patents on human embryonic stem cells held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
The Public Patent Foundation, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, and Jeanne Loring, a stem cell scientist at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in California, claim that the patents hinder research, push scientists to pursue work overseas and represent a waste of taxpayer money.
"It's absolutely absurd that one person or organization could own the rights to life itself," said John Simpson, stem cell project director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, based in California.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation _ or WARF _ is the patenting and licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin. University researcher Jamie Thomson first isolated embryonic stem cells in 1998.
WARF director Carl Gulbrandsen said he was confident the patents are valid, saying the challenge was motivated by politics and money.
"WARF stem cell patents do not inhibit research," he said. "They support and encourage it."
Simpson, Loring and others announced their...
Related Articles
By Erik Adams, Sundance | 09.08.2026
The scariest movie playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival isn’t about cursed audio recordings or a killer demon disguised as your true love; rather it’s a 110-minute essay film about how a handful of guys obsessed with numbers and...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
By Ann E. Marimow and J. David Goodman, The New York Times | 09.22.2026
Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday refused to intervene in a high-profile custody battle that involved difficult questions surrounding surrogacy and abortion, leaving in place a lower-court order that gave custody to the biological parents in the dispute.
The case drew...
By Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen, CNN | 09.18.2026
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The US...
