Robert Cook-Deegan’s Viewers’ Guide To the Super Bowl of Gene Patent Cases 2

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Does Myriad have rights to BRCA2?

The race to find mutations associated with inherited risk of breast cancer started with Mary-Claire King’s announcement of linkage to chromosome 17 in fall 1990. As Kevin Davies documented in his book Breakthrough, it is widely accepted that the team led by Mark Skolnick of the University of Utah and Myriad Genetics won that race to find BRCA1. They cloned and sequenced the gene and identified the first high-risk variants several months ahead of King and other rival groups in the UK, France and the United States. Utah/Myriad filed the first patent applications on BRCA1.

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I write a weekly blog for Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center community. Here I share an updated version of a blog post I wrote in September 2024, now supplemented by some poems I have written over the years that inspired paintings by my wife Harriet Weiner, who is a much better artist than I am a poet or writer. 

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