No, You Do Not Own Your Own Genes

To be specific, you do not own your genome. It's been patented by someone else. Who has more money than you do and claims to be able to put it to better use than you probably will (yeah, have another donut and a super size soft drink).

The researchers who uncovered this truth are fearful that if such patents are upheld, 'genomic liberty' will be lost. One can almost imagine rabble rousing revolutionaries defiantly shouting, 'Give me genomic liberty or give me genetically-engineered immortality.' Almost.

The real issue is that researchers attempting to solve medical riddles with health-related implications for both societal and individual cases may be thwarted by the aggressive defense of such patents. Fears have already been raised about not owning the very thoughts one thinks due to patent rights issues. But one can easily envision a situation, as the following article explains, in which a team of doctors working with someone who has cancer being concerned about patent infringement if they look at her DNA.

The issue of grabby patent ownership businesses attempting to claim the rights to information about individuals that the people in question never even knew about let alone gave their permission for has now reached the US Supreme Court. It is hoped that the court, as an essentially conservative institution, will attempt to limit excesses conducted in the name of science but devoted more to profit. The court has already expressed concerns about too-aggressive patenting strategies and may well find that claiming credit for the human genome has gone a molecule too far. But when it comes to commerce, human desire knows no bounds. JL

The Weill Medical School at Cornell University reports via Genetics magazine and Medical Express:

Humans don't "own" their own genes, the cellular chemicals that define who they are and what diseases they might be at risk for. Through more than 40,000 patents on DNA molecules, companies have essentially claimed the entire human genome for profit.

Two researchers who analyzed the patents on human DNA raises an alarm about the loss of individual "genomic liberty."

In their new analysis, the research team examined two types of patented DNA sequences: long and short fragments. They discovered that 41 percent of the human genome is covered by longer DNA patents that often cover whole genes. They also found that, because many genes share similar sequences within their genetic structure, if all of the "short sequence" patents were allowed in aggregate, they could account for 100 percent of the genome.
Furthermore, the study's lead author, Dr. Christopher E. Mason of Weill Cornell Medical College, and the study's co-author, Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and a member of the High Performance and Research Computing Group, found that short sequences from patents also cover virtually the entire genome—even outside of genes.
"If these patents are enforced, our genomic liberty is lost," says Dr. Mason, an assistant professor of physiology and biophysics and computational genomics in computational biomedicine at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell. "Just as we enter the era of personalized medicine, we are ironically living in the most restrictive age of genomics. You have to ask, how is it possible that my doctor cannot look at my DNA without being concerned about patent infringement?"
The U.S. Supreme Court will review genomic patent rights in an upcoming hearing on April 15. At issue is the right of a molecular diagnostic company to claim patents not only on two key breast and ovarian cancer genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—but also on any small sequence of code within BRCA1, including a striking patent for only 15 nucleotides.
In its study, the research team matched small sequences within BRCA1 to other genes and found that just this one molecular diagnostic company's patents also covered at least 689 other human genes—most of which have nothing to do with breast or ovarian cancer; rather, its patents cover 19 other cancers as well as genes involved in brain development and heart functioning.