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Supreme Court: No Patents For Natural DNA Sequences
ColdWetDog writes "The ongoing story of Myriad Genetics versus the rest of the world has come to an end. In a 9-0 decision, the US Supreme Court has decided that human genes cannot be patented.
From a brief Bloomberg article: 'Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said isolated DNA is a "product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated." At the same time, Thomas said synthetic molecules known as complementary DNA, or cDNA, can be patented because they require a significant amount of human manipulation to create.' Seems perfectly sane. Raw genes, the ones you find in nature are, wait for it — natural. Other bits of manipulated DNA / RNA / protein which take skill and time to create are potentially patentable. Oddly, Myriad Genetics stock actually rose on that information."
Adds reader the eric conspiracy: "The result for Myriad is that they still have protection for their test, however the decision also allows researchers to work with the DNA sequences that are predecessors to the cDNA used in the test." Here's an AP report on the ruling, as carried by the Washington Post.
The court case is over and the result wasn't actually all that bad. Sure Myriad and their stock holders would much rather have complete patent rights to the whole thing, but they kept the protections on their actual asset and the court case is now final and decided. Hell even if they'd lost completely their stock probably would have gone up because at least the risk was gone.
A breath of IP sanity from SCOTUS? And unanimously at that?
Pinch me. Surely I dream.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Oddly, Myriad Genetics stock actually rose on that information.
That's not really surprising. All that means is that the market expected the news to be worse than it actually was. Once the ruling was handed down and the uncertainty removed, the stock rebounds based on the new information. You'll see this all the time where a company has a terrible quarter and their stock price goes up because while it was indeed terrible, it wasn't as terrible as expected.
I am actually surprised by the ruling. I fully expected the courts to say you can patent anything, so long as you are first to file. Glad to hear it nonetheless.
This is definitely call-everybody-I-know newsworthy! Holy cow! Gonna mark this day and celebrate it next year! I can't believe this is happening!
is that Clarence Thomas said something (even writing an opinion). He's only been on the court, what, 10+ years or something?
Antonin Scalia's mind-meld field is vulnerable to disruption by sunspots, geomagnetic anomalies, and nearby homosexuals. Some mistakes are inevitable from time to time...
Contrary to the uninformed popular opinion, Clarence Thomas has been very active during his time on the court. He just mostly leaves questions in oral arguments to other judges, which is only a small part of what judges do. It used to be common for Justices to take that approach, but recently it stands out since the others have started to enjoy the sound of their own cleverness much more, whether it contributes to the resolution of a case or not.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Good job, SCOTUS
but it is well known fact that everything changes your DNA, even the food that you eat, could cause a change..
Put the comic books down.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Thomas writes opinions as often as any other justice. His famed silence only applies during oral arguments. And he's hardly the first "silent" justice - it's simply made more prominent by how verbose his colleagues are.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Justice Thomas has been on the court for more than 20 years (which, yes, is technically 10+, but still). During that time, he has authored more than 600 opinions.
Have we sequenced every variant of every species?
Case in point, Monsato make GM crops that resist herbicides. What if the parts they are patenting, have analouges in some other plant in the wild?
Silence is a state of mime.
This is really a great decision that benefits everyone, in the following ways.
1. Isolated DNA is not patentable. This allows R&D on DNA to proceed unencumbered.
2. Commercial development of technologies using synthetic DNA derivatives for useful products is encouraged by allowing patent coverage.
No. No more than the hundreds of patented products you have bought are owned by the patent holder. By providing you the cure, a hospital would be granting you a license to the end result. You own the result. But you might still face restrictions from providing the cure to others such as your descendents.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Isn't cDNA just same DNA but written a bit differently? That is, it contains same information. And it looks like this ruling allows one to patent that information! The very same information that is used to produce proteins in YOUR body. This ruling sounds like - we cannot allow you to patent your record in MP3 format, but if you transcode it to FLAC - go ahead and patent it. Doesn't make any sense.
Ah yes. Thanks. I keep trying to apply rationality to the stock market.
It is extremely rational behavior. Think of it like playing a poker hand. You have imperfect information so you make your bets based on the likelihoods of various results. Some results are more likely that others and you play accordingly. As more information becomes available your betting strategy may change. That is exactly what is happening here.
One has to understand what is driving prices for the stock market to make any sense. Information about company performance is at the core but it is NOT what drives prices. There is no direct link between a company's financial performance and their stock price. What drives prices is peoples expectations and in some cases people's expectations about other people's expectations. (and even expectations about expectations about expectations... you can keep going) If you invest in the stock market you are placing a bet not so much on what a company will do but on what other people will think about the company. When you buy IBM stock you are saying in essence "I expect more people to find this valuable in the future". Any secondary market (stocks, baseball cards, tulips, real estate, etc) works this way. It's shockingly rational (with some exceptions) but highly chaotic and thus hard to predict.
Everyone knew this case was at the SCOTUS, and everyone knew that patenting something that occurs naturally was not what patent law was supposed to do.
There is NEVER certainty regarding a SCOTUS ruling. Expectations cover a spectrum and not everyone makes the same bet. SCOTUS could have ruled in such a way that this company lost their patent protection altogether which appears to not have happened. Just because what you outlined is the most likely outcome does not mean it is the only possible outcome. Some people were clearly betting on other, more pessimistic, outcomes than the one that actually occurred. It's pretty much the same thing as betting on the long shot in a horse race instead of betting on the favorite. The odds are against you but if you are right the profit is much higher.
Stocks usually move at new information, not at confirmation of old information.
The SCOTUS ruling IS new information. Prior to the decision there were expectations regarding the ruling but it could not be treated as a certainty.
Perhaps you can explain this to me... what is the value of oral arguments at all?
The justices get vast piles of paper documents, extensive briefs, case histories, etc etc etc. The oral arguments are generally given only a single hour; if I remember correctly the PPACA was given a whopping afternoon. These are complex issues; a case doesn't reach the Supreme Court unless there is genuine disagreement among very high level legal minds. They will proceed to hash it out among themselves and with their clerks, for many hours.
Is anything actually achieved by oral arguments? It seems mainly an opportunity for lawyers to get flustered, choose the wrong tack while thinking on their feet, be manipulated by the justices, and oversimplify.
Is Thomas' silence really a comment on the fact that this is a waste of his, and everybody else's, time?
I'm asking this in all seriousness. I'm not a lawyer and I wouldn't presume to tell them how to do their business. But as an outsider, I find this perplexing.
Right. The process for making a cDNA copy of a particular sequence is probably patentable. But I'm betting Myriad didn't invent that process. Whoever did should be able to patent it, and Myriad should have to pay them royalties for applying the process to the BRCA gene. And maybe something as general as cDNA construction should be a FRAND-type patent, so that it's owner can't 'own' all DNA by owning the standard testing methodology. Just like Motorola isn't allowed to own the cellphone industry by virtue of having come up with the standard communications protocol used by cellphones.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Mostly Unanimous. Justice Scalia wrote a brief concurrence that, depending on how it read, suggests he doesn't believe in molecular biology. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he is just trying to say that SCOTUS should avoid pronouncing scientific facts in binding legal opinions.
JUSTICE SCALIA, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion except Part I–A and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology. I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief. It suffices for me to affirm, having studied the opinions below and the expert briefs presented here, that the portion of DNA isolated from its natural state sought to be patented is identical to that portion of the DNA in its natural state; and that complementary DNA (cDNA) is a synthetic creation not normally present in
nature.
"the US Supreme Court has decided that human genes cannot be patented."
Does it means animals and plants DNA can be patented?
"Human genes cannot be patented" is an overly broad interpretation of the ruling.
To say that these "isolated segments of naturally occurring human genes cannot be patented" would be more correct.
In the case where an inventor creates nonnaturally occurring gene sequence with markedly different characteristics from anything occurring in nature, it is left open whether or not those are patentable.
Plant genes meeting these criteria have been held to be patentable. See Monsanto, for example. It is possible that animal genes, or even human genes that meet this criteria would be patentable.
The court on the one hand looked to the "information" contained in the isolated DNA sequence to say that it was a product of nature, and ignored the molecular changes due to cleaving the sequence from the chromosome.
On the other hand, with respect to cDNA, the court ignored the information similarity between mRNA and cDNA and instead looked at the molecular differences.
These two situations are distinguishable. The court said that Myriad does not "rely in any way on the chemical changes that result from the isolation of a particular section of DNA". (p 14) However, Myriad does rely on the chemical changes that distinguish cDNA from mRNA.
Thomas did not call the construction of cDNA "trivial".
Nowhere in nature do you find genes encoded in GATC sequences on a dioxyribose backbone with their introns removed.
I wouldn't say there is no value as Justices may need to have a chance to clarify something etc. It is vastly overrated though and it is one of the reasons most Justices do not want cameras in court during oral arguments. As Scalia said, if the media is willing to follow all the relevant details of a case from beginning to end and devote a large amount of time to it (such as on CSPAN for example) then cameras would be fine, but just focusing all the attention on few soundbites and back and forth between judges and lawyers during oral arguments would be entirely unrepresentative of what the court actually does.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Is anything actually achieved by oral arguments? It seems mainly an opportunity for lawyers to get flustered, choose the wrong tack while thinking on their feet, be manipulated by the justices, and oversimplify.
These days, oral arguments tend to be a place for the justices to prod attorneys with particular questions. Often, it seems they do this with the intention of bringing up a point that might influence or accentuate an idea that could sway one of the other justices, rather than necessarily to clarify a question for themselves -- though, if they are really curious about a particular issue themselves, you can tell. They will keep cutting through the BS spouted by the attorney and hammer the same question until they get an answer. Maybe this is to prove a point to the other justices, but it can also be to assure themselves that they've gotten all possible perspectives on the question. Another common tactic in oral arguments is for the justices to pose interesting hypotheticals that they think may clarify the case, but which may not have been adequately addressed in briefs.
Is Thomas' silence really a comment on the fact that this is a waste of his, and everybody else's, time?
Actually, he's explicitly said why he doesn't talk. Oral arguments tend to be a lot of banter among the justices these days, but they used to let lawyers at least speak a little more. Thomas has said that he thinks his colleagues should give a little more room for attorneys to try to make points and bring up what they think is important.
I think he'd like to hear a little more and perhaps then ask questions relevant to the lawyers' points. But in the current court, we rarely ever get to hear a lawyer talk for more than 30 seconds on his/her own material before being interrupted. Thomas thinks this makes oral arguments more about the justices' preoccupations rather than what the lawyers think is important.
I can see his point. The justices get to debate each other and their clerks for hours on end about their preoccupations. Oral argument could be a place to get a few insights into the major concerns of the litigants, if we could ever hear them talk.
On the other hand, the justices will be the ones who ultimately decide things, so maybe it's best if they stick to the stuff that actually concerns them. It's just unfortunate when they start using lawyers as legal "punching bags," clearly only to drive home a point to one of the other justices.
When a researcher makes cDNA from mRNA, is the result only "not found in nature" if the original genomic DNA had introns.
So as a result should all prokaryote-derived cDNA be unpatentable? Perhaps only certain cDNA from humans are patentable (from genes with introns)?
Yes, this is correct. Justice Thomas writes (at page 17 of the slip opinion): "As a result, cDNA is not a “product of nature” and is patent eligible under 101, except insofar as very short series of DNA may have no intervening introns to remove when creating cDNA. In that situation, a short strand of cDNA may be indistinguishable from natural DNA."