Patents, Biotechnology, and Bioethics

March 20, 2006

(via New York Times)
Novelist (and M.D.) Michael Crichton has an essay in yesterday’s New York Times on a patenting case the Supreme Court is to hear tomorrow. In short, a company is claiming that it owns “licensing rights on the correlation of elevated homocysteine with vitamin deficiency.” These are the facts, and they are not in dispute: there is a correlation between elevated homocysteine and vitamin deficiency. Metabolite owns a patent on this fact. Another company, LabCorp, “published an article mentioning the patented fact. Metabolite sued on a number of grounds, and has won in court so far.”

Chrichton continues:

The question of whether basic truths of nature can be owned ought not to be confused with concerns about how we pay for biotech development, whether we will have drugs in the future, and so on. If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that’s your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it. And even if correlation patents have been granted, the overwhelming majority of medical correlations, including those listed above, are not owned. And shouldn’t be.