ACLU challenging US corporate biopiracy

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:24:09 GM

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=95093&sectionid=351020401

The biopiracy of US private enterprise has come up against an unexpected obstacle, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In a joint legal action with the Public Patent Foundation, a not-for-profit organization affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (PUBPAT) of New York, the ACLU has filed a complaint against Myriad Genetics' patent claim for exclusive 'ownership' of two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancers.

The two genes - known as BRCA1 and BRCA2 - are critical for the diagnosis and research into hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.

However, since the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) granted a patent for these genes to Myriad Genetics, any woman who is in need of diagnosis and any researcher who even wants to look at these genes or study them in search of better treatments, must first obtain permission from the company.

And, that is not cheap. Myriad Genetics demands a fee of upward of $3,000 for the privilege.

According to the ACLU's press-release, "the lawsuit, Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al., was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan against the PTO, Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on the BRCA genes."

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four scientific organizations representing more than 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals, as well as individual researchers, breast cancer and women's health groups, genetic counselors and individual women."

Although customarily patents were limited to inventions and not discoveries, in recent years, the US has been giving exclusive patents for what are considered discoveries, to the chagrin of many civil rights organizations and anti-corporate bodies in the US and farmers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors and the rest of the world.

According to the ACLU, US private corporations already claim ownership of about 20 percent of human genes.

Some of the US patent claims have caused international condemnation, especially for plants that have been traditionally around the world for medicinal and food purposes.

For example, the 1997 patenting of Basmati rice by RiceTec, a company based in Texas, which claimed ownership for the high-quality rice that has been cultivated in the Indian Subcontinent, since long before the advent of the USA, raised hackles in India and Pakistan.

The range of US corporations' patent claims has even extended to certain earth and lunar orbits. One such claim by Boeing - although legally highly dubious - resulted in the crash of the AMC-14 satellite in 2008, as Boeing prevented the owners - SES Americom - to use what it considers its orbits to salvage the spacecraft.

Industry sources confirm that such patent claims are "trite" as "basic physics has been re-branded as a 'process', and that the patent wouldn't stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as 'the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters'," reported SpaceDaily at the time.

Nevertheless, very few companies in the developing world have the wherewithal for launching legal challenges against baseless patent claims of US corporate giants, which are backed by the US government.