Can naturally occurring genetic material be intellectual property?

The US Supreme Court will soon rule on a case concerning patents on parts of the genome. Should a person be able to patent something in nature that he discovered? What about artificially created genetic products/sequences? Is a person's own genome his intellectual property? Can living organisms be subject to intellectual property law -- and if so, in what way?

Bill Callahan , 27.05.2013, 18:22

Idea status: under consideration

Comments

Alok, 12.10.2014, 07:02

Patents are government granted monopoly, and free markets by definition do not sanction monopolies.

Also, the premise of the current patent laws, is to encourage innovation, and by statute, they are not granted to discovery of laws or abstract ideas but only to methods and specific techniques.

So the question of patent-ability of naturally occurring genomes should obviously be not patentable.

However some companies seeking to profit from markets as they are, have patented "techniques" using a specific naturally occurring gene as its basis. This was actually struck down by the Supreme court in a decision against Myriad see http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2013/06/u.s.-supreme-court-strikes-down-human-gene-patents

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Can naturally occurring genetic material be intellectual property?

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