On the Edges of Science and Law

In the Year 2025, if Man and Woman are Still Alive, They’ll Be Vertical Farmers and Body Part Makers

 By Sarah Blenner

From Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to the 1969 hit song by Zager and Evans In the Year 2525, humans have pondered what life will be like in the future.  A 2010 report called “The Shape of Jobs to Come,” published by Fast Future, as a part of the Science: [So what? So everything] campaign, once again predicts the future—this time focusing on new and soon to be invented jobs and industries that will boom between the years 2010 and 2030.

Some of the professions that made the top 20 job forecast list for 2030 include: body part makers, nano-medics, vertical farmers, weather modification police, social “social networking” workers, time brokers, and space tour guides.

Thicket of Uncertainty in the Gene Patent Debate

By Keith Syverson

In 1998, Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg wrote that the proliferation of biotechnology patents created a tragedy of the anticommons where "people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other."  This phenomenon is also referred to as a "patent thicket" where there are multiple different patents from different owners.  Over the past 12 years, many studies have been published evaluating the effect of intellectual property rights in medical research and diagnostic testing.  In October 2009, a group of European scientists led by Isabelle Huys investigated whether the proliferation of gene patents or patents on diagnostic methods created a patent thicket.  The article, Legal Uncertainty in the Area of Genetic Diagnostic Testing, concluded that there was no patent thicket with regard to claims that actually claim DNA sequences, but that there were enough different claims on diagnostic methods to create a chilling effect on medical diagnoses and restrict access to care.

The authors provide an empirical analysis of the nature, extent, and scope of patents relating to 22 of the most commonly tested for genetic diseases in Europe which include cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, and colon cancer.  They then compared the claims to the best practice guidelines in Europe and the United States for testing of susceptibility to these genetic disorders to determine if the patents had any effect on access to genetic testing in either country.  The authors concluded that there was not a "thicket" of patents covering only genes because most of these patents could be easily invented around.

Sorry Darwin, It's Not All In the Genes.

 By Lori Andrews

This week's Time features a cover story, "Why Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny."  This is a far cry from the sentiment twenty years ago at the start of the Human Genome Project.  At that time, a prominent psychiatrist announced, "The war is over in the nature/nuture debate" -- implying that everything was due to genes (nature).  Or when, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Time itself ran a cover story proclaiming "Infidelity--It May Be In Our Genes." 

In the intervening two decades, scientists have learned that human traits and behaviors are caused by a complex array of factors.  When researchers begin searching for a gene related to height, they found variations at 20 different points in the genome that were related to a person’s stature.  And even if all 20 were analyzed, that only accounted for 3% of the variation between people in height. 

Zinc Fingers Could Point to Future Cures, But Gene Patents Could Get In The Way

  By Jake Meyer

A December 29th, 2009 article in The New York Times describes a new technique that allows for the editing of human genes.  The technique uses natural agents called "zinc fingers," two loops of protein that can recognize specific sequences of DNA have multiple potential uses.  Zinc fingers could be used in the future to engineer new crop plants, treat human diseases, and to make alterations to sperm or egg cells –- alterations that would be inheritable. 

Zinc fingers can be used to turn on or off a gene at a specific DNA site.  An agent that turns the gene on or off can be linked to the zinc finger, which recognized and attaches to the specific DNA site.  But zinc fingers have another use which makes them a promising technology for gene therapy –- they can cut out and insert DNA from the gene sequence.