Image via WikipediaIn a radical departure from my usual blogging subjects, today’s topic will be PATENTS and the absurd way they are being handled by our judicial system.
As you know, if you invent something, you can patent that invention. A patent acknowledges you as the owner of the invention and prevents all others from copying it and or selling it without your permission.
The concept of a patent seems very simple but lately that simple concept has been challenged.
Since I work in a medical industry that has many patented technologies, I started becoming concerned when patents were being granted for “ideas” or “interpretations”. Let me give you an example. CRP or C - reactive protein, is a naturally occurring substance in our blood that when measured, can indicate a specific medical condition. A high level usually indicates a state of inflammation.
Some medical researcher who studied CRP and the role of inflammation in humans, concluded, based on his studies, that the inflammation the CRP test indicates could point to cardiac involvement as in cardiovascular disease and he wants to patent that conclusion? What the hell did he invent?
So in our literature that comes with our CRP test, we cannot state that elevated CRP levels may indicate a coronary problem because that conclusion belongs to a specific scientist and only he can use the conclusion even though the conclusion applies to all makers of CRP tests.
Now a federal appeals court has granted a patent to a firm that discovered a variant of a human gene.
Now we all know that we, as humans, posses genes which govern who we are and everything about us. Since the Gnome Project which mapped out our DNA sequence, we are quickly discovering the roles of individual genes. We are also discovering which gene mutations cause certain conditions or diseases.
One company, researching breast and ovarian cancer causes, discovered the gene mutations that indicate a heightened risk of breast or ovarian cancer. These genes are labeled as BRCA1 and BRCA2 and testing for the presence of these gene mutants could warn females of their impending risk and allow them to take preventive measures.
Well the company that discovered these genes and their correlation with cancer has patented that discovery which prohibits researchers from using those genes to develop tests as well as perform further research.
Since these gene mutants exist in humans, what the hell did they invent? They just discovered the genes that cause a specific cancer and to me, that medical discovery is un-patentable as are all other medical discoveries. Now if you invented a unique test to identify these mutant genes…that’s an invention…go patent it…but you cannot patent a naturally occurring material even if you were the first to discover it.
One judge said that “Extracting a gene is akin to snapping a leaf from a tree”.
This will go to the Supreme Court BUT my point is why it has to, when simple logic should have prevailed in this case.
I think judges can be easily bamboozled by creative scientists using all sorts of scientific jargon that judges could not possibly be conversant with and that is my point, an invention is an invention, finding something is not inventing it; it was always there.
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