In 2009, [lawyer Chris] Hansen, a veteran of civil-rights cases at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York City, embarked on a lawsuit that ended gene patenting in the United States. The effort seemed doomed, yet Hansen went on to win at the US Supreme Court, challenging the very idea of what patents are and what they should do.
The unexpected twists and turns of that case — as well as its impact on medicine, and particularly on the lives of women affected by breast and ovarian cancer — are ably and affectingly detailed in The Genome Defense.
Its author, patent scholar Jorge Contreras, has been a vocal critic of over-reaching patents and the universities that grant exclusive licences to their intellectual property, particularly when they nurture monopolies and sign over responsible stewardship of their patents to the licensee.
Contreras spares us the details, pulling out only nuggets that are needed to understand the case. He explains the science and legal arguments clearly and succinctly. (He does a better job of this than did some of the lawyers and justices involved, who trotted out painful analogies throughout the four-year process: genes were likened variously to chocolate-chip cookies, baseball bats and kidneys.)
