Patently… Racist?
via The Scientist:
“Some Jewish women in Europe could face discrimination in access to breast cancer diagnosis as a result of changes made to a patent for the gene BRCA2, owned by Utah-based firm Myriad Genetics, geneticists said at a meeting this week. They said that the changes could mean that women seeking testing would have to disclose whether they were Ashkenazi Jews, and might preclude testing in countries without testing licenses.”
Myriad narrowed its claim specifically to diagnostic application in “Ashkenazi Jewish women” in order to stave off an anticipated challenge that the patent had an overly broad scope.
“In the upcoming hearing, the Belgian Society of Human Genetics and the French Institut Curie will argue that the BRCA2 patent was given to Myriad wrongfully. In front of several patent examiners, the opponents plan to argue that there is no way to define when a woman is Ashkenazi Jewish. They also want to make the ethical argument that a patent should not be granted on one population and not the other.”
Oops.
…
Interestingly, the original BRCA1 gene patent was rejected on technical grounds (small errors in the specification of the sequence claimed), rather than for ethical reasons.
