Gene patents challenged again

Melissa Parke, member for Freemantle, intends to present caucus with her bill only two months after the Raising the Bar bill was passed into law by Labor.

Speaking on ABC’s Lateline on Monday night, Parke said that while Raising the Bar represented a significant reform to patent law, it failed to directly address the issue of gene patents.

She cited three primary reasons why the patenting of genes is wrong. “It’s wrong because genetic information belongs to all of us and should not be the subject of private property,” she said on Lateline.

“It’s wrong as a matter of legal principle, because it’s a fundamental principle of patent law that there must be an invention, and clearly no-one invented our genes. They are products of nature not the product of any corporation.

“And it’s wrong as a matter of public policy to allow the exclusion of health researchers and clinicians from having access to genes that they need to be able to diagnose disease and to be able to develop new treatments, medicines and vaccines.”

Parke stressed that she was not concerned about other aspects of patenting health innovations, but added that patenting genes was detrimental to the health industry.

“The health community is saying to the biotechnology industry: you can patent the cure; you can patent the treatment; you can patent the vaccine; you can patent the medicine; but don’t patent the gene, because that belongs to all of us.”

The Raising the Bar bill includes a broad research exemption which allows scientists to perform research on the subject matter of a patent, but doesn’t allow them to go on and commercialise their new findings.

Parke said the recent decision by the United States Supreme Court to invalidate a patent by Prometheus Laboratories on the grounds that it concerned a law of nature rather than representing a genuine invention supported her position that discoveries concerning genes are not valid subject matter for patents.

Parke has yet to present the bill to caucus.