patents

A recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reversed a lower court’s decision that Myriad Genetics’ composition of matter claims covering isolated DNA molecules were patent-ineligible products of nature “since the molecules as claimed do not exist in nature”.

Three weeks ago, on March 10, the Advocate General of the European Union’s Court of Justice, issued a non-binding preliminary opinion “in complete independence” on the question of the meaning of the term “human embryo” in the 1998 European Commission directive on the patentability of biotechnology inventions.

Briefly, I would say that Science is not the enemy; science would not be science if it does not fulfil the human quest of discovery, wherever it may lead. The true enemy is human dialogue on the one hand and abuse of science on the other. Human dialogue is often found solely under the disguise of confrontation and argumentation without any effort to empty oneself of one's prejudices to truly understand the other. This holds usually for both sides of the argument.

The Hinxton Group http://www.hinxtongroup.org/ recently released its third set of recommendations titled: "Statement on Policies and Practices Governing Data and Materials Sharing and Intellectual Property in Stem Cell Science". Tension is increasing between fairly new and pervasive policies and practices governing data and materials sharing and intellectual property in science, and norms of openness and free exchange.