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1/5 of All Human Genes Have Been Patented
mopslik writes "A story on National Geographic News cites a study claiming that 20% of all human genes 'have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.' While universities hold 28% of all gene-related patents, 63% belong to private firms, with a whopping 2000 patented genes (approximately 67%, or 50% total) belonging to a single firm." From the article: "You can find dozens of ways to heat a room besides the Franklin stove, but there's only one gene to make human growth hormone ... If one institution owns all the rights, it may work well to introduce a new product, but it may also block other uses, including research ..."
The only reasonably good news is that such patents should expire, and when they do they can't be re-patented again. But given the dismal record of extending copyrights well beyond the time of anyone living today, can patents be far behind?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Given the amount of time it will take to really grasp how all these genes and things play together, the patents could mostly be expired by the time the innovation comes. Yeah, I know they'll extend them forever like copyrights at some point. Say it with me... P.T.O must Go. P.T.O must Go.
Unless the patent term is extended some time before then. And then they will still be encumbered.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I, on the other hand...
So what does having a "gene patent" mean?
My RNA is transcribing genes all the time into proteins, am I now violating someone's patent? What's the difference between my body using my genes and some machine I create using them?
This sounds so retarded... must.. control... urge... to cuss...
Making the US healthcare industry and supporting industries a private, for profit enterprise was an epic disaster, particularly in the department of research and IP. Companies will only pursue solutions to medical problems they think they will be able to have exclusive control over, in order to ensure they can profit from them. PROFIT??? This is people's HEALTH we are talking about here! Profit shouldn't even be part of this discussion. It's about the people you are trying to help, period. End of discussion. Motivation problem solved. The only questions should be 1) what holds the best promise for helping people 2) how do we produce it safely and 3) how do we produce it inexpensively. National ownership and public right to all medical information should be an absolute no brainer. Don't give them the excuse of needing to make up research costs to have high prices. Fund all medical research Federally, and base it solely on potential healing merit and educational benefit. Peoples' health should not have a price tag on it - people are the only reason a society exists at all. That's like saying its not cost effective to evacuate poor people from a potential disaster area, since they aren't important to the economy and are easily replaced. (Note to the hysterical - that's an example of an argument as wrong on as many levels as I could make it wrong, not an actual argument I'm making.) We don't stand for that, and I don't think we should stand for medical research and production costs being dictated by profit potential analysis.
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I have heard the arguments before that medical research moves faster because of the profit motive, but I don't believe it and would have to see hard evidence to believe it. Medical research is like anything else - individuals are motivated by a paycheck and perhaps the chances to help people/do interesting work. COMPANIES are motivated by profits, and I don't believe corporate thinking has been a net positive to the medical world in any sense. Quite the reverse, actually.
I don't know how I could sleep nights knowing I ran a company that had (for example) decided to pursue less promising but potentially profitable cures instead of building off of public domain but very promising work. As a human being it would haunt me.
Here are some examples of profit-motive-as-only-motive issues (I'm sure many more could be found in a few minutes):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/acs/20050928/hl_acs/resea
http://www.accessmed-msf.org/prod/publications.as
And now patenting genes. Great. In case there weren't enough issues out there slowing things up, we now add potential patent litigation as yet another reason not to pursue ideas. Because, thanks to the profit motive we know that barring enormous financial resources people will avoid these areas rather than risk having to fork out for patent licensing fees. What a messed up system. Personally I think the nation's system needs to be totally ripped out, all the way from the admistrative system to the drug companies, and redone with one and ONLY one focus - how can they help those who need it. Individuals working in the system can still be paid well - individual incentive is fine since it draws smart people, but the companies contribute nothing beneficial to the people needing help and should be cut out of the loop.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Seriously though, shouldn't the religious fundementalists be up in arms about this? This could be a great opportunity for them to do something good for the community.
Visualize Whirled Peas
The whole point of genes is that they are an instruction set for building various parts of you. In other words, the genes themselves are worthless it is their application that matters - that's the whole point! Allowing a company to patent the instructions for growing lungs is insane.
The patents basically mean that for the next 20 years, nobody else can even do research on the patent without the permission of the patent holder.
The patent holder will only give that permission if the people doing the research sign over patent rights to the company owning the original patent.
Effectively, a lot of research is going to take at least 40 years to happen, with the results being patented out to 60 years. That's when you may start seeing useful stuff finally making it into the public domain.
That is, of course, provided that other nations give a damn; US patents are valid only in the US, and there are about 150 other nations to choose from where you can do research and treat patients. In many of those, patenting genes is either impossible, or they are considered too small right now to bother patenting in.
From the article, it sounds like a lot of these genes are being patented without actually having the use for it. The purpose behind patent law is to allow somebody to share their information with others without fear of losing intellectual ownership. These patents are more like staked claims on land. "I claim this gene for the growth hormone. I don't yet know HOW to do it, but I know this is the gene that will do it, so I'll just claim it before anybody else gets it". Simply knowing what a gene's purpose is should not be enough to grant a patent, IMO. They should be required to actually have information on HOW it is used to be able to patent it as a process.
It's like saying "I patent rubber for use in wheels, because I know wheels should be made of rubber. I'll make no attempt at explaining how to make a wheel or how to use the rubber on the wheel, just that I want to collect money from anybody who says 'rubber' and 'wheel' in the same sentence"
we are patenting the laboratory copy of that thing.
I didn't think you could patent copies of things. I thought it had to be an actual invention, and they can't really say that they have invented anything.
It just doesn't seem right.
It sounds to me that one method to detect genes in general was found years ago, and all these gene patents are, are obvious (or semi-obvious) extensions/variations to the method.
Would that be correct or am I missing the boat?
You see, the tension in copyrights is between large media stakeholders and the great unwashed who want to watch Marx Brothers movies for free.
The tension in patents is between large monolithic corporations which can afford the patent rigmarole and large monolithic corporations looking to build off existing R&D.
In one case, there's a balance of power. In the other, there's not. Hence copyright is extended, while patents remain the same.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I was curious about this too. As I understood Bill Van Etten who spoke at LISA on Nov. 18, 2005, naturally ocurring genes have hundreds or thousands of inert codons. The laboratory version eliminates those, and it is this "efficient" version of the gene that gets patented. The follow-up question that didn't occur to me then was: so why couldn't I put a few inert codons into the gene and declare myself non-infringing?
I know it's easy to call "evil" on the bioengineering firms that are filing these patents, but this issue is much more shades-of-grey than that.
These companies are basically patenting roadmaps for the different genes in human DNA. The research involved in creating one of these roadmaps is VERY expensive. Tremendous medical progress will result from having these roadmaps, and that progress will benefit everyone, but someone has to make the big investments first to get us there. Just as we're seeing with space travel, private industry is more likely to fit the bill for this kind of "long road to profit" work than the federal government is.
Now, I'm not completely in agreement with the idea of being able to patent these roadmaps, but you can't have a debate on this without examining the alternatives:
1) If the populace were more enthusiastic about making serious bioengineering progress, the government could perhaps spend more money on this research, resulting in more of these roadmaps being public domain right off the bat, and thus allowing more private companies to compete with products based on those roadmaps. On the other hand, making the roadmaps might be expensive, but so is everything in the business plan that follows it. So, increased potential competition might actually discourage competition, though I'm sure in the end supply-and-demand guarantees that someone will take the plunge and try to profit from making next-generation genomics-derived products and services, so maybe my point here isn't valid.
2) I'm not a bioengineering expert, but it seems to me that trade secrets would be more appropriate than patents here. Company X spent $50 million figuring out a gene? OK, well, let them keep the results to themselves, they can release products based off of it, and the only people they'll have to worry about competing with are the other ones who independently spent $50 million to figure out that same information. This seems a more fair compromise, rather than demanding full exclusivity. I am, of course, assuming that it's easy to keep this information secret while simultaneously releasing products derived from it, and, not being an expert in the field, I don't know if this is possible or not.
3) On the other hand, using patents has its advantages to the public good. Firstly, given the still-limited spending on research into this area, it *is* somewhat wasteful for multiple companies to simultaneously invent the same wheel, when there are so many other wheels companies could be inventing at this very opportune point in time. So, in other words, there's SO MANY opportunties opened up by biotech, genomics, nanotech, etc, that we might be better off encouraging companies not to compete for the time being. There's enough "killer apps" for everyone, in this case.
4) Another advantage of patents to the public good: After 20 years, when the patents expire, the expensive-to-produce roadmaps are both freely available AND public domain, so anyone can obtain and make use of them. By contrast, if companies went the trade secret route, there's no real motivation to ever release the roadmaps to the public domain at all, nevermind in as little as 20 years.
Of course, none of these points of view are perfect. But I present them simply because I don't think the knee-jerk "patents are evil, patenting human genomes is ESPECIALLY evil" applies here. Given the various possibilities, I think the patent situation is one of the better ones. Of course, it would be better if one company didn't own such a large percentage of the patents.
Certainly I can't think of any entirely perfect way for all this to unfold, but however it unfolds, the benefits to come from all of this will be unfathomable. Really it's just a question of
1) How QUICKLY will progress in these fields be made?
and
2) How long will it take to trickle down and become affordable to the masses?