Patents on genes. Reasonable or not?

There have been a number of controversies surrounding patents on genes. The Patent office is issuing them, but are they legal? Can you patent something that is found in nature? If not, what is the incentive for private companies to invest in the development of genes as disease cures?

Ezra Klein weighs in on this issue today.

It turns out that the scientific basis of gene patents was wrong. A stretch of DNA doesn't just encode a protein one-for-one; what it does typically depends on interactions with other genes. And since you can't - I assume - patent the whole genome, the logical basis for gene patents collapses.

I always thought that Patents were for inventions, not for discoveries in nature. But whatever patents are for, they require that a full understanding of the process involved be published as part of the patent process. This discovery suggests that existing patents do not meet this requirement.

researchers found that the human genome might not be a "tidy collection of independent genes" after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, like a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood.

I don't know what the legal solution is going to be, but depending on the two-century-old American patent system doesn't look like it will be that solution. A new legal structure of rewarding individuals and companies who make the effort to determine what individual genes do and how they can be used needs to be developed. That's going to be a slow and painful political process.