Wretches and Genes: We Come For You

While the field of biology – the largest recipient of federal funding – was booming both technically and commercially in the 1980s, not only have research results become much more marketable and lucrative, but the commercialization of inventions entailing this boom also came to be perceived as more acceptable.

For Crichton, this was the turning point in which university professors and researchers have increasingly come to hold corporate ties, where “humanitarian scientists are now businessmen concerned with profit and loss” as the distinction between the practices of universities and biotech firms have become either absent or non-existent. While disagreeing with the dystopian notions of Crichton’s claims, Adrian Zahl, patent lawyer of Ridout & Maybee LLP, stated in an email interview that regarding how gene patents are pursued, there are no real noticeable differences between universities and the industry. Accordingly, “in all cases, researchers seek to obtain as much protection for their innovations as the law will allow.”

For Zahl, the Bayh-Dole Act has brought beneficial changes for the industry. The transfer of technology to the private sector has led to important life-saving innovations that were perfected and delivered to patients through the market place, as was the case with the blood thinner warfarin developed by the University of Wisconsin.

Professor Joly also disagrees with the viewpoint that the act has led to a seemingly totalitarian ownership of genes by corporations and their academic partners. In regards to the patents on human genes and pathogens, Joly notes, “the fact that these patents have been granted doesn’t necessarily mean that they are actually valid.” The legal ownership of the patents of the human genes and pathogens such as Hepatitis C and Haemophilius Influenza are no longer valid due to the Myriad decision as well as other Supreme Court rulings.

Isolated gene patents represent a mere fraction of the biotech landscape, where methods of testing, a specific strand of a mutation of the gene, or even the use of non-human genes in fields such as agriculture by firms such as – cue Darth Vader sound track – Monsanto and its ever infamous GMOs. Thus, regarding the integrity and the future of the ownership of the building blocs of human life, the Myriad ruling can indeed be considered as a modest victory for bodily and genetic integrity. However, as mentioned earlier, the biotech industry has moved on to cDNA and its possibilities, where the ghost of Reagan and his followers of the cult of greed still prominently linger in the realm of research and the life sciences.

A Call of Arms to Generation Y

With the push back of Myriad’s monopoly of the BRCA genes, as with the announcements of the new BRCA, a resulting increase in competition in the biotech market can benefit the public good through the attainability of cheaper and more diverse genetic tests. With the decoding of the human genome, the rising importance and effectiveness of targeted gene treatments, and the increasing success of curing diseases that can arise from a one odd gene within the human body, the future of health and medicine would become inseparable from the access to the nano-verse lying within the building blocks of our body and of life itself.

However, the developments of the last 30 years such as the privatization of research have also proved to be a double-edged sword, as actors within the previously public sphere have come to know the taste of profits and of greed. While warfarin has indeed saved lives previously unsaved, the namesake organization of the drug (WARF – Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation – which is actually a private entity) has used its patent on a number of stem cell lines to demand royalties from any related invention by the non-profit California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.