Who owns your genes? Plus the end of Climategate, drilling is not boring, smashing success, and more foolishness
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WHO OWNS YOUR GENES? YOU DO, FOR THE MOMENT. At Booster Shots, Karen Kaplan describes the gene patent court ruling this week and explains why it's a bombshell. Of many blog posts on the decision, the Best Lede Award goes to Brandon Keim at Wired Science:
When you went to sleep last Sunday night, 20 percent of your genome belonged to a researcher or company. One day later, following federal district court judge Robert Sweet's ruling, it belonged to you.
Well, temporarily perhaps. Defendant Myriad Genetics vows to appeal, and one line of commentary has it that the future of the biotech industry hangs in the balance. The other side argues the opposite, that biotech will progress even faster if nobody owns genes.
At the Bioethics Forum, Ann E. Mills and Patti M. Tereskerz bury their lede in graf 5, but the post provides useful brief background on gene patenting, pro and con, if you need to catch up. If you want and/or need more, Daniel Arthur's two posts at Genetic Future, here and here, provide links to an extended analysis and comments.
The underlying argument is about whether genes are natural substances. Natural substances can't be patented. The answer seems obvious to me, and perhaps to you. But not so fast. There are intricacies. John Timmer explores some at Nobel Intent.
'CLIMATEGATE' IS NOW WATERGATE UNDER THE BRIDGE. OR SO WE HOPE. Much bloggery also over a Brit parliamentary committee's finding that scientists at the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University did not try to suppress climate data — and, perhaps more important, that nothing about the email hacking dustup last year casts doubt on the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring.
Not that the skeptics will believe it. For a brief recap, see PZ Myers at Pharyngula. See also posts at Climate Progress and many many posts and comments at Real Climate.
DRILLING, NOT BORING. Drill, baby, drill, says Ezra Klein, briefly noting — and mocking — the Administration's decision to permit drilling for oil off the Atlantic coast. At The Great Beyond, Jeff Tollefson provides a few details.
The fulminations have not yet begun in earnest as I write. At this point the most interesting commentary by far comes from Charlie Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker:
Being of occasionally devious mind, The Tracker suspects that President Obama and his advisers are pulling a political fast one and it has little to do with expectation of (safely controlled) gushers off shore. It goes like this — first figure that, just as most big-picture analyses suggest, there's not enough oil and gas offshore of the US, even in Alaska or along the southern Atlantic seaboard, to make much difference to ultimate CO2 levels or to American energy independence. Second, let the drillers explore anyway to show that the current administration, as with nuclear power, is closing off no options and making it more palatable to a bigger spectrum of the public and of members of the US Chamber of Commerce. Third, this is easy cash, better than raising taxes: those leases put money into federal coffers. It won't balance the budget, but it can't hurt. Fourth, if they do find oodles of oil and gas it won't be cheap to extract out there, raising fuel prices and helping renewables to compete. Fifth: There is always the carbon tax third rail to grab.
Although the news stories and commentary nearly all note superficially that Obama might profit from a gesture toward the oil industry, the subtler points Charlie makes I have seen nowhere else. I would like to know more. I think somebody ought to give him an assignment or two, don't you?
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE. Charlie is in top form this week. His outburst on the Large Hadron Collider's success at smacking protons together at near-light speed — and the possible futures it will generate — is also irresistible.
But imagine the press when some NEW science pops up, or out or whatever direction from which something pops when it's been hiding in another dimension, and shakes physics to its very foundations and undermines the very laws of known creation while leaving mankind gaping gobsmacked slack-jawed flatfooted and stupefied into an immensity of revelation as the Standard Model shatters on the reefs of reality. It will be so much fun for gee-whiz reporters! One can only hope.
Get more details from physicist Marcelo Gleiser at 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. He is more sedate, but only on the surface.
IT'S A DAY LATE TO BRING THIS UP, BUT speaking of the LHC, that august circularity took time out from celebrating its particle-smashing feat to issue a press release about a result. In French as well as English, it announced discovery of what it called a paleoparticle: "a hideous particle from the prehistory of the Universe." (Hideous because it lacked two essential quarks: beauty and charm.) Just one of the April 1 items from physics pranksters, all reported at The Great Beyond.
And this publishing merger announcement, reported by John Travis at ScienceNOW, is essential reading for all science writers.
