Four speakers gave their views on the ethical and legal aspects of genomic research at Thursday’s symposium hosted by the ISU Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities.

Lori Andrews, distinguished professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, was the first speaker in the afternoon session of the symposium titled “The Ethical, Philosophical and Legal Implications of Genomic Research.” She spoke about genetic research and gene patents.

Andrews said research has been limited by patents because only the patent holder can look at and work with the patented gene.

“This all is very odd to me. I have a First Amendment right to give money to [a] campaign but I don’t have a right to give my breast cancer gene to a researcher because if that researcher looked at that gene it would violate the patent,” Andrews said.

Andrews said some people feel genes can be patented because they spend money finding the genes, but money doesn’t constitute reason for a patent.

“It doesn’t matter how much money you spend doing something, that doesn’t justify a patent,” she said. “I could spend a huge amount of money discovering a planet and I don’t own that planet.”

Andrews said a lot of the money used to sequence genes came from public funding.

“A lot of the money spent here was taxpayer money,” she said. “One year alone, $1.8 billion of taxpayer money was spent on genomics.”

Andrews said others argue that patents on genes are the same as patents on drugs. She said she believes there are differences.

“There are fewer downsides to having a patent on drugs. I can invent around it,” she said. “If I own the BRCA1 breast cancer gene, people can’t invent around, you can’t do any diagnosis, gene therapy without infringing on something somehow.”

Andrews said there are things we can do to help undo the damages done by patents on genes.

“We could try to undo gene patents through litigation,” she said. “For 150 years, the Supreme Court has said you can’t patent a product of nature, but why haven’t we seen any challenges?”

Jeff Murray, professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa, was the second speaker of the afternoon and spoke about advances in the genome project from a scientific standpoint.

Murray said one of the biggest projects this year was the human metagenome.

“The metagenome is something that is really important,” Murray said. “A lot of what’s in or on us we don’t even know what it is. So if you just extract a DNA sample from the skin, you’ll find anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of that DNA comes from organisms that we can’t identify.”

Murray said the Genome Wide Association project made many advances this past summer.

“Several Genome Wide Association articles were published over late spring, early summer that identified predispositions to a number of common complex traits,” Murray said. “This is the idea that there are strong evolutionary relationships of DNA sequence variants that extends back in time tens or even hundreds of thousands of years and some of those variants are now present across human populations.”

Murray said several disorders, including breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, type-2 diabetes and glaucoma all had genetic predispositions identified during research this last summer.

Speakers in the morning session of the symposium included Troy Duster, professor of sociology at New York University and at the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge, and Karen-Sue Taussig, assistant professor of anthropology and medicine at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.