Ever since the first human gene was patented in 1982, there’s been a near-universal ‘What??!!’ when people hear that it’s legal for someone to own the rights to our DNA. Blame the Constitution, which empowers Congress to give inventors ‘the exclusive right’ to their discoveries;’ the patent office, which interprets ‘discoveries’ as including genes; and the courts, which have said similar patents ‘promote the progress of science,’ as the Framers wrote. So far, all that has trumped complaints that patents on human genes (of which some 40,000, covering about one fifth of the genome, have been issued) ‘halt research, prevent medical testing, and keep vital information from you and your doctor,’ as novelist Michael Crichton wrote in 2007. But maybe not for much longer. In the first lawsuit of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation of Cardozo School of Law argued last week in federal court in New York that patents on breast- and ovarian-cancer genes held by Myriad Genetics are unconstitutional because they restrict research and thus violate free speech. I defer to others on the legal merits here. But the scientific issues, while no slam-dunk, have become serious enough in the […]