Supreme Court rules human genes may not be patented

The part about introns and exons is very important. Normal ("naturally occurring") DNA has a bunch of extra stuff that is not coded for proteins (introns) and that may not serve much useful function for therapeutic research but are useful as unique identifiers/markers.

The cDNA mentioned in the judgment is not a simple XOR of the original information. It is an XOR of the information after the section of DNA has been isolated, and with all the introns stripped out. Using cDNA, one cannot recreate the original full DNA strand because it is like lossy compression.

My take on this ruling is found here[1], discussed on HN here[2].

> "... by affirming that cDNA can be patented, it may strengthen the incentives for investing in research in this area"

If the court had been discussing meaningfully modified DNA, rather than cDNA (which occurs naturally), I'd probably agree with this quotation from Mr. Crouch. As someone who has done molecular biology in an academic research laboratory, it seems as though the Court is using the term "cDNA" to represent some idea slightly different from what scientists mean by cDNA.

Or, at least, their rationale for apotheosizing cDNA is confusing. If intron removal is one of the key steps, and intron removal occurs naturally in the cell before the process of cell harvesting and cDNA creation begins, it is confusing (to me) to say that cDNA creation is a patent-worthy "creation".

The essential transformation (the removal of introns) is done by nature within the cell without any instruction from the lab tech. cDNA creation–the step that SCOTUS seems to view as key–is performed largely because mRNA is not stable in most convenient aqueous solvents. If mRNA were stable, we'd probably have mRNA libraries instead of cDNA ones.

1 = http://blog.carbocation.com/post/52902698213/supreme-courts-...

2 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877259

Courts by necessity rule on lots of different things that they aren't experts in. If we have specialized courts for scientific issues, should we have specialized courts for accounting issues, securities issues, etc? Have you ever seen the accounting systems in a modern corporation? It can get highly technical and complicated.

Courts have experts to explain to them the legally significant aspects of different issues, and it works reasonably well.

In my experience, courts, at least federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court, don't usually get decisions wrong because they don't understand the problem domain. Instead, courts don't share the value systems of people within those fields. And that irritates practitioners on philosophical grounds.

Consider internet technology. People who work on internet technology tend to have a value system that emphasizes certain characteristics ("the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it."). But you don't have to believe in free and universal access to information, etc, to understand how TCP uses sequence numbers to create a reliable protocol out of unreliable IP.

I feel the same is true with things like gene patents. The objections do not seem to me to be based on pointing out how the Supreme Court doesn't understand this or that bit of science. The objections are philosophical: "you can't patent nature."

There's 3 billion base pairs in human DNA, not to mention the other millions of species out there. It seems like your chance of finding a naturally occurring complement to what you want, without introns, is pretty good. Then what?