U.S. gene patents: Patient care stymied in Canada, hospital claims

An Ottawa hospital is challenging the legality of gene patents that hamper the ability of doctors to freely screen for potentially deadly genetic diseases without fear of being sued for patent violations.

On Monday, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) started a legal process in Federal Court that could decide if human genes can be patented in Canada.

"The core position really is that no one should be able to patent human DNA," said Alex Munter, president and CEO of the Ottawa-based CHEO. "It would be like patenting water or air."

Supreme Court Rules For Monsanto In Patent Case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday that an Indiana farmer violated Monsanto Co.'s patents on soybean seeds resistant to its weed-killer by growing the beans without buying new seeds from the corporation.

The justices unanimously rejected the farmer's argument that cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator are not covered by the Monsanto patents, even though most of them also were genetically modified to resist the company's Roundup herbicide.

Patenting the Sun - Big Pharma wants to own naturally occurring genes. What would Salk say?

In 1955, when Jonas Salk's successful polio vaccine was announced, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow famously asked the scientist: who owns the patent on this new drug that has finally wiped out one of the most dreaded scourges of the century? Salk replied matter-of-factly: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent."

He paused, as if to let this seemingly obvious fact sink in, then continued: "Could you patent the sun?"

Fast-forward a half century, and Salk's statement seem quaint, if not downright quixotic.

Can We Patent Life?

On April 12, 1955, Jonas Salk, who had recently invented the polio vaccine, appeared on the television news show “See It Now” to discuss its impact on American society. Before the vaccine became available, dread of polio was almost as widespread as the disease itself. Hundreds of thousands fell ill, most of them children, many of whom died or were permanently disabled.

How patent abuse crushes innovation

"When Patents Attack!" is the title of a recent episode of This American Life, a program produced by Chicago's National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ Radio. This one-hour episode is an expose of a new and parasitic industry that's burst on the scene in recent years, namely the "patent troll" industry. It also takes a look at the current patent war under way between the giants in the tech sector.

Patent trolls buy up patents, particularly software patents, often by the thousands. They have absolutely no intention of developing new and innovative products or services. Their business is to either litigate or extract cash in the form of licensing fees from those who actually do innovate. Patent trolls frequently make their home in eastern Texas, an area of the world with the most patent troll-friendly courts on the planet.

The simple truth is that very little computer software is new. What is new and innovative is developing new ways to combine many previous software ideas to create a new programme.

Many software ideas have patents that are controlled by patent trolls. Others are controlled by large software corporations or industry consortia. What makes it even more complicated is that many software patents conflict or obviously have been covered by prior art. Since the 1990s, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been flooded with software patent applications, to the point where very few of them have actually been examined in detail before a patent was issued.