Awesome article! Thank you for posting this. I just recently started really looking at Hacker News (mostly because of my Y Combinator application), but I have b

Awesome article! Thank you for posting this. I just recently started really looking at Hacker News (mostly because of my Y Combinator application), but I have been really impressed with the breadth of stuff posted here. I am a molecular biology major and used to do lab research in this area, so I find it fascinating. I will say that the U.S. Patent Office really needs a refresh in terms of who it hires. Both in terms of software patents and molecular biology, it is pretty clear that the people issuing these patents don't understand the core issues. The isolation of a DNA sequence should not be patentable, any more than reading data off a disk drive is patentable. Both these technologies relied on years of publicly funded scientific research and a myriad of different technologies. This company has merely built on those findings. If they have discovered a novel way to analyze the results of a specific sequence, and determined a provable correlation between a specific sequence variant and getting breast cancer, then perhaps this is an invention that deserves patent protection in the form of a commercializable product. In no way should this restrict further research in the area, however. The entire point of the patent system is to trade disclosure for protection. These guys seem like they want to prevent anyone else from researching these genes entirely, which in my mind is just plain selfish and goes against the spirit of the patent system. I agree that there needs to be some benefits to companies that produce novel discoveries in the area of information technology (which is really what we are talking about regarding molecular biology and software patents). Patenting genes is not the way. Patenting software algorithms is not the way. Bottom line: Our legislators need to get off their asses and adapt our laws for the 21st Century. Or we need to find new legislators who will.