Genetic Food for Thought

Over the last year and a half or so, I have been reading a book called Cracking the Genome: Inside the race to unlock human DNA by Kevin Davies. I still haven't finished the book, but I'm well on my way to. I just wanted to share a couple of interesting things that I read.

On page 84 I read the following about a gene called BRCA1 that, if mutated, would increase your chances of developing breast cancer:

"In one dramatic example, the wife of Joseph Schulman, the director of the Genetics and IVF clinic in Fairfax, Virginia, decided to have her BRCA1 genes tested because of a family history of breast cancer. The result was positive: one copy of her BRCA1 gene was missing two letters, putting her at heightened risk of a breast tumor. She chose to undergo a prophylactic mastectomy (full removal of her breasts if you didn't understand the medical lingo), even though she had no signs of cancer.
Other women were not so fortunate. One woman had both her ovaries removed after a commercial genetic test for BRCA1 mutations came back positive. Follow-up studies by a university team revealed that a mistake had been made: she did not have a mutation. The company that initially performed the test, Oncormed, refunded the $350 testing fee 'as a small token of our concern.'"

How would you like to be that women? When I read this, I couldn't help but blurt out "a small token of our concern!" and laugh slightly to myself. Not because I thought it was really all that funny, but because the company was just so nice to refund the test result. Wow.

The next little bit is on page 161 about the dispute over patenting genes:

"One disgruntled citizen voiced her protest about the gene-patenting stampede in rather bizarre circumstances. Donna MacLean, a British waitress and poet, filed patent application GB0000180.0, in which she sought to patent... "Myself." MacLean wrote, "It has taken 30 years of hard labor for me to discover and invent myself, and now I wish to protect my invention from unauthorized exploitation, genetic or otherwise. I am new: I have led a private existence and I have not made the invention of myself public. I am not obvious." MacLean said she was outraged by the "grasping, greedy atmosphere" surrounding human genome research and decided to see if she could be granted protection for her own genes. The case is pending."

Reading this was quite amusing. Patent yourself. Who'd have thought!