Crichton Gets It Right

After his jeremiad against global warming, I figured Michael Crichton, whose novels have long been a guilty pleasure of mine, had gone over to the dark side. State of Fear was not only bad science. It was a lousy read.

Today, though, he's on the New York Times op-ed page with an attack on gene patents that may allow me to once again contribute to his royalty checks. He sounds all the right themes: they impede research and they needlessly run up the costs of diagnostic tests. He touts legislation introduced last week by Xavier Becerra (D-CA) and David Weldon (R-FL) that would ban gene patents. I hadn't heard about the bill until now, but I will be interested in taking a look at it. Do they propose to invalidate the 20 percent of the human genome (about 6,000 genes) already owned by entrepreneurial university-based scientists?

One way to promote scientific collaboration without a long court fight over legisation is to have the National Institutes of Health require that any gene patent awarded as a result of a government-financed project (the vast majority) be made part of a common patent pool. That would guarantee that any researcher could get access to the use of that "invention" at minimal cost. The trade-off for that researcher is a requirement that any downstream invention they come up with also must become part of the common pool. Should the patents lead to a successful therapy down the road, all the patent owners can share in the royalties. Pooling is one way to preserve the incentives of the patent system while promoting scientific collaboration, which is being undermined by the current system. I proposed a patent pool for the emerging stem cell field in an article that appeared in PLoS Medicine a year ago.

Crichton makes one telling mistake in today's article. He says scientists working on the Human Genome Project were "surprised" when the patent office allowed gene patents. Au contraire. Scientists like Craig Venter of Celera Genomics filed hundreds of patent claims on the information generated by their efforts to decode the naturally-occurring building blocks of life. Oh well. He's a novelist. You can't expect him to get everything right.