Where the Catholic Church and Obama's Department of Justice Agree

The ACLU has taken on gene patents and it is suing Myriad and the US Trademark and Patent Office for issuing patents on naturally occurring gene sequences.  The judge in the case has agreed that Myriad's patents on the BRCA I and BRCA II gene variants are invalid. Myriad has appealed the decision.

A couple of weeks ago, in an unexpected move, The US Department of Justice filed an amicus brief that essentially states that naturally occurring genes cannot be patented and that it does not support the practice.  One argument for gene patents has been that isolating DNA out of its natural environment is a sufficient enough innovation to grant a patent on the sequence.  The Department of Justice disagrees.  From the brief:

“the unique chain of chemical base pairs that induces a human cell to express a BRCA protein is not a ‘human-made invention.’ Nor is the fact that particular natural mutations in that unique chain increase a woman’s chance of contracting breast or ovarian cancer. Indeed, the relationship between a naturally occurring nucleotide sequence and the molecule it expresses in a human cell – that is, the relationship between genotype and phenotype – is simply a law of nature. The chemical structure of native human genes is a product of nature, and it is no less a product of nature when that structure is ‘isolated’ from its natural environment than are cotton fibers that have been separated from cotton seeds.”

“We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA,”

Here is where things get interesting.  The Patent Office has announced that they will continue to award gene patents even though the Department of Justice has come out against it.  Once again, on the Federal level the left hand is doing exactly what the right hand says not to.

I believe that patenting naturally occurring gene sequences is unethical. It is hard to find official Church teaching on gene patents, but I did find this quote from John Paul II in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences:

The ability to establish the genetic map should not lead to reducing the subject to his genetic inheritance and to the alterations that can be made to it. In his mystery, man goes beyond the sum of his biological characteristics. He is a fundamental unit, in which the biological cannot be separated from the spiritual, family and social dimensions without incurring the serious risk of suppressing the person's very nature and making him a mere object of analysis. By his nature and uniqueness, the human person is the norm for all scientific research. "He is and he ought to be the beginning, the subject and the object..." of all research (Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, n. 25).

On this subject, we rejoice that numerous researchers have refused to allow discoveries made about the genome to be patented. Since the human body is not an object that can be disposed of at will, the results of research should be made available to the whole scientific community and cannot be the property of a small group.

I believe that I am interpreting John Paull II correctly by saying that is unethical to patent a naturally occurring gene. Patents should be be awarded for inventions, like novel approaches to testing or manipulating the gene, but not for the gene itself.