You could say that the god has spoken. James D Watson, discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine, says patents on genes are unnecessary. And harmful. And burdens all of society.
In an unexpected amicus curiae brief filed in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the Myriad Genetics case, the celebrated scientist explains how such patents are wrong for scientists, for society and for the human race. Watson, who has been at the forefront of advances in genetic engineering, has written directly to the court “given the significance of the issue at hand”. He believes courts are not able to understand the importance of what is at stake. “What the Court misses, I fear, is the fundamentally unique nature of the human gene. Simply put, no other molecule can store the information necessary to create and propagate life the way DNA does.
It is a chemical entity, but DNA’s importance flows from its ability to encode and transmit the instructions for creating humans. Life’s instructions ought not to be controlled by legal monopolies created at the whim of Congress or the courts,” says the brief filed on June 15. Decades ago he had described as lunacy the patenting of human genes.
But some background on what has stirred this 84-year-old scientist to join issue with this landmark litigation. The brief, interestingly, is “in support of neither party.” The Myriad Genetics case is the most watched patent battle and relates to the right of the Salt Lake-based company to patent two isolated human genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. These account for most inherited forms of breast and ovarian cancers.
