Patents for intellectual property
Authors: David Korn, Roger E Meyer
Journal: The Lancet (2000)

Jonathan Rees (Sept 2, p 849)1Rees J Patents and intellectual property: a salvation for patient-oriented research?.Lancet. 2000; 356: 849-850Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (13) Google Scholar has identified a serious issue and proposed an ill-considered solution. The difficulty of attracting more physicians into biomedical research generally, and especially into clinical research, has been publicised in the USA for at least 30 years with increasing urgency. Only lately have the National Institutes for Health and private funders responded by starting various new programmes to strengthen the training of clinical investigators and to help to stabilise clinical research careers. Additional mechanisms are under consideration. Different theories have been offered to explain why so few young physicians choose research careers, but no single cause has been definitively established. Accordingly, it is too early to predict which, if any, of the new approaches will be successful. Educational indebtedness, increasing complexity of contemporary medical research that demands rigorous formal research training different from traditional clinical training, lack of adequate exposure to clinical research during undergraduate and graduate medical education, and perceived bias against clinical research at major establishments are all involved. A major factor has been the profound change in the US system of health-care delivery and financing, which is eliminating clinical surplus funds that have been the major sources of support for clinical research and training, and is destabilising the long-established infrastructure of clinical academic scholarship. Rees argues plausibly that a solution is to attract more funding for clinical research but proposes that this be accomplished by extending intellectual-property protection to medical processes, such as clinical and pathological diagnosis, the recognition of new diseases and syndromes, and the description of new practice procedures. He aptly described the commercially driven expansion in the biomedical sciences, which springs from the establishment of the biotechnology industry and promises miraculous new treatments for presently intractable disorders. However, the increasingly commercial perspective threatens an epidemic of patenting and increased privatisation of fundamental and applied clinical knowledge that has always been in the public domain. Society has not yet, in our view, created the mechanisms necessary to ensure continued rapid and efficient reduction of biomedical discovery into clinical application, while preserving the robust base of fundamental biomedical research on which all future scientific advancements depend, and to prevent the conversion of new medical knowledge and medical processes to private property. The only plausible way that we are able to understand Rees's recommendations is as a satire of the extremes of commercialisation in the patenting of DNA. If he is serious about the patenting of clinical and pathological diagnoses and the recognition of new diseases and syndromes, we cannot imagine a more distasteful and problematic recommendation. This solution flies in the face of established medical ethics and codes of professional conduct.