The concept of being able to patent a gene has always been a preposterous one to a lot of scientists. A gene, after all, is really just a short piece of information–given a specific DNA sequence, you can assemble and replicate it from scratch in less than a week with only basic tools. Which makes it really exciting to hear that a federal judge has ruled that it is not legal to patent the human genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. (more…)
An article in the New York Times this week described a disease threatening to destroy the tasmanian devil population that appears to actually be the second known case of a transmissible cancer. This is bad news for the tasmanian devils, of course–it appears that this disease may wipe them from the wild–but I was intrigued to see the confirmation of a idea that I had been pondering recently: whether or not cancers could act as a transmissible disease. (more…)
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