"Brand You" Really Does Belong to You!

It's taken several years for the case to wend its way to the Supreme Court, but today, thankfully, the Court ruled unanimously that your genes are your own.

Seems obvious, doesn't it?

More than three years ago, I commented on round one of this case, when US District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet struck down seven patents held by Utah-based Myriad Genetics that were the basis of tests that looked for mutations of the BRCA 1 and 2 genes. Those mutations are associated with a substantially greater risk for breast and ovarian cancer. The only way to know whether you have the mutations is to pay approximately $3000 for the Myriad Genetics test; Myriad has refused to license the test to other companies. The suit had charged that by doing so, Myriad kept prices artificially high and prevented woman from getting a second opinion from another testing company.

Myriad had argued that without the potential for significant financial gain that the patents represent, there would be no incentive to invest in potentially life-saving research.

As I wrote then: "I think that many of us, who are not genetic scientists, find it hard to understand (and more than a little ambiguous morally) that a corporate entity could own genes that come from our own bodies."

The Supreme Court today, as reported by the New York Times' Adam Liptak, ruled that "isolated human genes may not be patented." (Full article, here)

Writing for the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas stated, "A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated. It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes."

There's some wiggle room left for companies like Myriad, however: The manipulation of a gene "to create something not found in nature" would be patentable.