Actually, I can’t make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient’s test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.
This Essay Breaks the Law by Michael Crichton, The New York Times, OP-ED Section, Sunday, March 19, 2006
Maybe this will convey to more people that Software Patent Reform and patent reform in general is needed.
One reason proponents of software patent reform don’t get very far is that big pharma likes patents broken just the way they are, so that they can own profitable things such as parts of the human genome. As Crichton says:
Do you want to be told by your doctor, “Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?”The question of whether basic truths of nature can be owned ought not to be confused with concerns about how we pay for biotech development, whether we will have drugs in the future, and so on. If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that’s your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it. And even if correlation patents have been granted, the overwhelming majority of medical correlations, including those listed above, are not owned. And shouldn’t be.
I like patents. But I think there are serious problems with the current patent process, and I think Crichton is doing us all a favor by sounding the alarm.
-jsq