The following is an excerpt.
Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of co-plaintiffs appeared for oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit challenging a Salt Lake City genetics company that owns patents on two human genes…
Supreme Court observer Lyle Denniston, on his well-read SCOTUS blog, explained why this is a thorny legal issue:
“No one on the court was in doubt that Myriad would have been entitled to a patent if it found some unique way to make use of the genes it has isolated, but the justices drew a sharp distinction between creative applications and the core natural item, the gene itself. But [the] Myriad case in some ways involves a patent that sort of straddles the two,” he wrote.
View the original article here: The U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether a private company can patent human DNA material
