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Comment by onewaystreet | Hacker News Reader

> This is a result that will have major practical consequences, and is likely to save thousands of lives.

No, companies will stop doing research now.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRCA1

"The first evidence for the existence of such a gene was provided by Mary-Claire King's laboratory at UC Berkeley in 1990. Four years later, after an international race to find it, the gene was cloned in 1994 by scientists at University of Utah, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Myriad Genetics."

Myriad Genetics are the sole licensee of the patent. They weren't solely responsible for it's discovery, or successful cloning.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_Genetics#BRCA1_co-disco...:

>BRCA1 co-discoverers National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) University of Utah Research Foundation Université Laval/Endo Research – Quebec The Hospital for Sick Children – University of Toronto University of Tokyo Myriad Genetics, Inc.

>BRCA2 co-discoverers University of Utah Research Foundation The Hospital for Sick Children – University of Toronto University of Pennsylvania Myriad Genetics, Inc.

The research was done by many organisations, not just "companies", and was done with no guarantee of profit. There are some researchers who are actually altruistic, and believe in medical progress to save lives.

More likely they'll come up with a rhetorical workaround that makes perfect sense to judges, patent attorneys, and poorly-informed juries from the Australian equivalent of East Texas.

With software patents, for instance, there may be no way to claim ownership of Algorithm X in a given jurisdiction's patent system, but there's probably no obstacle to claiming "A machine that executes Algorithm X." The problem then becomes tractable: just write the claims in such a manner that they cover all practical implementations of such a machine, present or future.

It will now be the job of the company's patent counsel to come up with a similar artifice to claim ownership of any conceivable test or diagnostic process that involves specific BRCA genes. I'm sure they'll pull it off, somehow.

Failing that, the company's lobbyists will simply ensure that the next regional or global trade agreement mandates that each ratifying nation implement gene patents.

>No, companies will stop doing research now.

That's what I'm worried about, too.

For example C60 [1] is a curious molecule that can't be patented anymore. In a rat study it showed to prolong the rats' lives by over 90% [2] by protecting the rats from cancer.

Sadly there won't be any human study anytime soon (if at all) because it's just not financially viable without the possibility of patenting the stuff and extracting fantasy prices for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene

[2] http://www.kurzweilai.net/fullerene-c60-administration-doubl...

Governments need to directly fully fund studies in promising but unpatentable medicines.

There's enough billionares who want to live forever. They'll fund it, if only so their own lives last longer.

You'd be surprised. It's hard to get people to fund SENS anti-ageing through which they could literally live forever. In general, humans don't have a survival instinct, only a "don't die right now" instinct.

You should read the comment section of the second link. The badly done research was done by someone whose business is selling snake oil with c60 in it.

Hmm, interesting.

Has anyone here access to the referenced paper [1] and can confirm that "Anthony Loera" worked on it?

[1] http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S014296121200323...

Ref.: Baati T, et al., The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60]fullerene, Biomaterials (2012), doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2012.03.036

Does that mean that National Institutes of Health can also shut down its research, saving some $30 billion in taxes to go elsewhere? Here we have tax money that funds universities and researchers, and apparently 20 years patents are required to find uses from all that work.

Lets also forget that passing drug test also grants additional state granted monopolies as a way to encourage just the very scenario stated above.

If companies stop doing research then the research can be done by universities or similar institutes.

Yes, but no university can afford to take the research results, make a cure from it and bring it to market. The regulatory overhead literally devours billions of dollars to get a new medicine approved.

And if a company can not expect to have some exclusive rights on that for at least a few years no one is going to spend that money. Competitors could just take your medicine, copy it and sell for lower because they had no upfront costs of getting it approved.

The economics behind pharmaceuticals are perverted - but at least they work.

The government can, though. And should.

Odds are the "make a cure from it" part would be a human invention and therefore patentable.

And even if all "cures" are no longer patentable - society wants cures to diseases. So if the system isn't delivering cures society will change the approval system[1]. It's not like the current approval process was handed down from god on stone tablets.

1) Or change patent law to cover discoveries from nature.

Odds are the "make a cure from it" part would be a human invention and therefore patentable.

That's a use patent and it's inferior to a composition patent.

Look at what's happening to Pfizer in the UK. They had a use patent on Lyrica, but no composition patent on it. That means anyone is free to make the drug. You can't really stop a doctor from using a drug for a certain disease if it's freely available.

Here we're not talking about medicines with ruinously expensive approval processes, though; we're talking about gene-based diagnostic tests. Non-invasive diagnostic tests don't have anything like the same kinds of regulatory hassles, because there isn't a question of side-effects - it's purely a question of how accurate they are.

You know. I can live with that, even if it's true.

You know what I cannot live with? My genes being owned by somebody else.

I literally can't tell if you're serious or if you're being sarcastic

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