But what that meant in practice was that if you wanted to get tested for one of these mutations, you basically had to get it from Myriad - no cheaper options and no second opinions allowed. Myriad had invested millions of dollars and staked its future as a company on being able to use those patents to corner the market on clinical testing for dangerous BRCA mutations. Myriad had extracted, isolated and patented the BRCA genes, which, when mutated, are responsible for the majority of inherited breast and ovarian cancer cases. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So Hansen got to work finding just the right company to strategically sue in order to topple the whole practice of gene patenting, and he settled on a company called Myriad Genetics out of Salt Lake City. HANSEN: The notion that some private company can own a part of my body seemed to me blindingly obviously a civil liberties issue. By the mid-2000s, an estimated 20% of the human genome had been claimed as private intellectual property. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Hansen looked into it and discovered that companies had been patenting genes for decades. HANSEN: And I said, well, that's just wrong.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Genes - like individual pieces of our DNA. Supreme Court and how it raised an even more fundamental question - what does it mean to invent something?ĪLEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: One day back in the fall of 2005, Chris Hansen was sitting in his office at the American Civil Liberties Union, looking for his next big case when the ACLU's science adviser popped in.ĬHRIS HANSEN: And she said to me, do you know that genes are patented? Can you patent a human gene? Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi of our Planet Money team has the story of how this question wound up at the U.S.
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