SCOTUS Blog

The SCOTUS Blog was a big hit last year with the Obama Care decision. The blog got a facelift just in time for the big decisions of 2013. They even created a video to tell you all about the new features. So now you can get the scoop on the upcoming Prop 8, DOMA, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act decisions at the same time as the media.

You can add you comments as the decisions are released over the next few days. The rest of this post will be about the Court's decision on DNA patents which was released last Friday. I dug into the details  found on SCOTUS Blog, largely because of the question raised by Ron during our meeting. At first, I thought that the decision was a good one, but I completely changed my mind after the investigation. So here is a summary of what I found.

Myriad Genetics claimed two patents; one for a DNA gene and the other for a cDNA gene, which was created from the DNA gene by removing the extraneous information. The patent for the DNA gene was denied because it was found in nature, but the patent on the cDNA gene was upheld because it was not. But upon a detailed investigation, it is highly questionable if cDNA is truly synthetic. For DNA to make protein, its information must first be transcribed to RNA. RNA naturally gets rid of extraneous information when it transforms into its messenger form. All that Myriad Genetics did was use the messenger RNA as a template to stamp-out the cDNA, a common procedure. The information content of the naturally occurring messenger RNA was identical to the cDNA. The cDNA was still declared to be synthetic because its chemistry does not naturally exist. Nevertheless during oral arguments, the judges said that cDNA patent might be challenged on the basis that it lacked originality.

When Clarence Thomas wrote the majority option, he upheld the cDNA patent strictly on the basis that it was technically synthetic and deliberately excluded any discussion that the discovery lacked originality. The decision was not only bad science, it was also bad law. Yet this was the exact decision that the Solicitor General had requested in his amicus brief. Was this a gift to the biotech industry?

The Myriad patents were going to expire anyway in 2015. So this case was really about setting precedent. It turns out that the cDNA patent was more valuable than the DNA patent since the cDNA version is needed in creating recombinant DNA, a high profitable process. So by using a legal slight-of-hand, the court removed that stigma of patenting natural DNA, while preserving the profits of the biotech industry by allowing patents on cDNA, even though it is directly derived from natural DNA.

Drug Trial Shenanigans

There was a lot of interest on drug trials today, no surprise. There was some concern that drug safety would be compromised if some drugs were allowed to be approved quicker. However, this assumes that our current system is satisfactory. Here is a TED talk which exposes the flaws in our current drug trials. It may be that we would be no worst off if the drug trails were performed quicker.

In a totally unrelated story, the tea kettle below was in the news this week. See if you can see what the controversy was about.

Here is the story. Can you see the resemblance?