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> To put it much more simply, there is nothing that a 6-year-old would consider “invented” about the patentable cDNA. That's the point. Patent law is very sui
by HarryHirsch 13y ago
> To put it much more simply, there is nothing that a 6-year-old would consider “invented” about the patentable cDNA.
That's the point. Patent law is very suitable for processes that cost millions to develop, but in pharmaceutics the big cost factor isn't process development, it is the discovery. What Myriad did is identify the gene, that is where the cost was sunk that they somehow have to recover.
But since you can patent only things, and not intellectual property, the Supreme Court had to resort to all kinds of legal hacks of the sort that judges hate to see applied in their courtroom.
- jamesjporter 13y agoSaying that Myriad was the first to discover BRCA1 is somewhat disingenuous; other labs did it independently at roughly the same time. Moreover, deciding when a gene was "discovered" is a minefield. What constitues discovery? Identification of a mutant? Cloning the gene? Sequencing it? There are many steps to this process.
- HarryHirsch 13y agoYou'd say that correlating certain mutations in the gene to increased risk of breast cancer constitutes discovery, it certainly does in the context of a clinical test for breast cancer, which is what Myriad is selling.