The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments and examined one of the most pivotal cases in healthcare and personalized medicine: AMP v. Myriad Genetics. The case will determine if patents on human genes should be allowed, and the Court is expected to issue a decision next month. This case i... [More]

The Supreme Court recently began deliberations in a case that highlights a deeply problematic issue concerning intellectual property rights: Can human genes—your genes—be patented? Put another way, should someone essentially be permitted to own the right, say, to test whether you hav... [More]

The Supreme Court agreed with Monsanto on Monday that an Indiana farmer’s un­or­tho­dox planting of the company’s genetically modified soybeans violated the agricultural giant’s patent. The court unanimously rejected farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman’s argu... [More]

On April 15, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. This was another significant step—probably the penultimate one—in the long-running Myriad drama. It began with a group of plaintiffs (including researchers, doctors, an... [More]

THE nine justices on America’s Supreme Court must apply their minds to the thorniest of legal questions. On April 15th they were presented with a particularly testing puzzler: should the law allow people to patent human genes?   The case is the culmination of a battle that began i... [More]

The business of DNA is undergoing a revolution. We can already get our genes scanned for the bargain-basement price of $99. Soon we’ll be able to have entire genomes sequenced for less than the cost of a MacBook Air. That’s huge considering that not so long ago it cost billions of do... [More]

The Supreme Court on Monday seemed skeptical that a human gene can be patented but also worried about what a decision to bar such patents would mean for private scientific inquiry and research.   Even the normally confident justices expressed some trepidation as they considered the comp... [More]

On April 15th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear our landmark legal challenge to Myriad Genetics’ patents on the “breast cancer genes,” BRCA 1 and 2. Corporate ownership of our genes harms women’s health and blocks progress on breast cancer. This is an historic case t... [More]

When Daniel Weaver pitches Genformatic to potential investors, he feels obliged to note a future legal uncertainty. The two-year-old company, based in Austin, Texas, offers whole-genome sequencing and analysis to researchers and physicians, with plans to apply the technology to medical diagnostics... [More]

Asked in 1955 whether his polio vaccine was patented, Jonas Salk replied, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” With that, Salk debunked the misguided notion of patenting objects found in nature. His polio vaccine was not a new invention but an inactive form of the natural ... [More]