Monday, June 25, 2012
Republicans and the ACLU
In a post on LinkedIn's Patent Law Group's discussion on Prometheus, Bay Area Patent Attorney Tom Hunter said:
Tom Hunter, J.D., Ph.D. • It took congress 15 years to pass the new patent act. -- A completely dysfunctional institution. Moreover there are a number of congressmen, particularly on the republican side, who view patents on biological materials, and personalized diagnostics to violate the public good, and to be crimes against god and nature. Honestly I'll be completely amazed if congress does anything about it. Our best hope is that the PTO and the Fed Cir will push back.
Does this suggest that if Congress takes up the issue of gene patents that there will be an alliance of liberal Democrats(i.e. ACLU types) and the Republicans to which Attorney Hunter alludes? I invite Attorney Hunter to name the Republican congressmen he has in mind in the comments section of this blog.
Tom Hunter, J.D., Ph.D. • It took congress 15 years to pass the new patent act. -- A completely dysfunctional institution. Moreover there are a number of congressmen, particularly on the republican side, who view patents on biological materials, and personalized diagnostics to violate the public good, and to be crimes against god and nature. Honestly I'll be completely amazed if congress does anything about it. Our best hope is that the PTO and the Fed Cir will push back.
Does this suggest that if Congress takes up the issue of gene patents that there will be an alliance of liberal Democrats(i.e. ACLU types) and the Republicans to which Attorney Hunter alludes? I invite Attorney Hunter to name the Republican congressmen he has in mind in the comments section of this blog.
Friday, June 15, 2012
CAFC 2nd round Briefing Deadline
A post in Nature News Blog reminds us that today is the deadline for filing briefs in the second round of the Myriad case before the CAFC.
See:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/06/gene-patent-case-ramps-up.html#wpn-more-19758
See:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/06/gene-patent-case-ramps-up.html#wpn-more-19758
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
HGP = Talmud ?
A quote not be missed is found in an article in the New Yorker magazine of 12 June 2000 about the race to sequence the human genome. Mostly, it is about Craig Venter's role, but also discusses a biologist named Norton Zinder, who is one of Watson's best friends. Zinder, like Watson, is a founder of the Human Genome Project.
Zinder told the ‘New Yorker’ in 2000 “Before Vesalius, people didn’t even know they had hearts and lungs. With the human genome, we finally know what’s there, but we still have to figure out how it all works. Having the human genome is like having a copy of the Talmud but not knowing how to read Aramaic.”
A link to this article is:
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Venter-Genome-Warrior12jun00.htm
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