Myriad ruling causes confusion

摘要

There was a party waiting for Elizabeth Chao when she arrived for work last week at Ambry Genetics, a medical-diagnostics company in Aliso Viejo, California. On 13 June, the US Supreme Court ended the 30-year-old practice of awarding patents on human genes - an outcome that Chao, a geneticist and chief medical officer of Ambry, had wanted for a long time. "It's such a win for patients," says Chao. "Everyone was crying, jumping up and down and shouting." In Washington DC at law firm Sughrue Mion, patent lawyer William Simmons was having a rather different day, fielding phone calls from agitated clients in the US biotechnology industry. Although the Supreme Court case was limited to human DNA, the ruling will probably be applied to other molecules such as proteins, as well as to other organisms - including agriculturally important plants. "It's a mess," says Simmons."we had a lot of clients saying,'what are we going to do?'"