The restriction granted by the BRCA1 gene patent covers essentially everyone. Hopefully this ridiculosity will help overturn other gene patents. How does a string of nucleotides extant in the human body count as a process, design or new invention?
I wonder if Ben Goldacre is right that we should all be able to understand this sentence:
This makes claim to any sequence of 15 nucleotides, the “letters†of the
genetic code, coding for any part of the protein made by the BRCA1 gene.
I agree that we should have an ambition to teach everyone how to understand this and why the underlying science is so brilliant. I have a suspicion that the knowledge itself might not necessarily that useful for John and Jane Doe in their day-to-day life.
In related science news, Dame Shirley Porter funded a report associated with Prince Charles on alternative medicine. Egad.
It was always a way to funnel money away from academic research and into the private sector. Gene isolation is a time consuming and expensive process and it stopped being politically acceptable to have it publicly funded, so the deal was “you guys pay and you get to keep the gene patent and make your money back”. The idea that people own their own genes may seem obvious to us, Enlightenment fuddy-duddies that we are, but it wasn’t to the governments of 20 years ago who negotiated the rules. Hurrah for the judiciary.
politician’s aren’t noted for their education, intelligence, general knowledge: I broaden the canvas to include finger wagging at the likes of Brown (the UK PM) who I sincerely class as uneducated. He has a doctorate in poltics… now if that isn’t a Mc degree I don’t know what is. No wonder he is innumerate to the extent of having been such an incompetent chancellor.
My serious point is: without a basic level of education, they are not equiped to make decisions, as they don’t understand thebackground to stuff: cannot think in a stattistical way, or apply logic…. e.g. the MMR balls up… “No correlation -> no cause and effect”. Had politicians or journalists on the whole had a basic level of understanding about logic, that fiasco would never have happened as being so trvially a nonsense…. bhut they are so badly educated they didn’t realise what jack asses they were even entertaining it…