Aggregated News
When the Justice Department declared in a court filing late Friday that genes should not be eligible for patents because they are products of nature, Harold C. Wegner, an influential patent lawyer in Washington, did not mince words.
“Eric Holder Hijacks the Patent System, Flunks Patents 101,” Mr. Wegner wrote in an e-mail to 1,250 people, referring to the attorney general.
Sharp reaction greeted the declaration that human and other genes are not patentable, a reversal of what had been the government’s policy for decades.
One patent lawyer characterized the new position as dumb. The Biotechnology Industry Organization warned that such a policy, if carried out, would “undermine U.S. global leadership and investment in the life sciences.”
But the new stance cheered those who believe that such patents retard rather than spur medical progress and interfere with people’s access to information about themselves.
“If you want to look at your own genome and see if you have a mutation, you should be able to do that without paying a license fee to someone else,” said Steven Salzberg, a professor of...