Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA
by Jorge L. Contreras
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2021
432 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
In this riveting, behind-the-scenes courtroom drama, a brilliant legal team battles corporate greed and government overreach for our fundamental right to control our genes.
When Chris Hansen, an ACLU lawyer, learned that the US government was issuing patents for human genes to biotech companies, his first thought was: How can a corporation own what makes us who we are? Then he discovered that women were being charged exorbitant fees to test for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer—all because Myriad Genetics had patented the famous BRCA genes. So he sued them.
The Genome Defense gives us a front-row seat as Hansen and a team of ACLU lawyers, along with a committed group of activists, scientists, and physicians, take their one-in-a-million case all the way to the US Supreme Court. Jorge L. Contreras, an attorney at the forefront of genetics law, interviews more than a hundred key players as he lays out the groundbreaking legal strategy to challenge human gene patents. The culmination of years of work, his book is both an intimate look at the cancer survivors whose lives have been affected by this case and a sweeping investigation into the fallout from our technological age of discovery.
Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Genome Defense is a powerful and compelling story about how society struggles to balance scientific advancement, corporate profits, and the rights of all people.
"[E]ye-opening...Contreras brings the large cast of case-participants to life with vivid prose, and the exciting final spectacle before the Supreme Court is heart-pumping—of the packed courtroom, Contreras writes...The result is a thorough page-turner." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A superb lesson on patents in general and the grotesque American patent system in particular...Contreras assembles a large cast of lawyers, judges, activists, scientists, and patients and engagingly describes four years of tortuous legal action that saw victory in federal court, reversal on appeal, and a final triumph in the Supreme Court...Fascinating." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A gripping and important tale of how corporations were patenting our own genes and selling them back to us. Contreras give us front-row-seat access, deft character sketches and crystal-clear explanations of law and science." - Jordan Fisher Smith, author of Engineering Eden
"A remarkable, fast-paced read. Contreras tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the Supreme Court stopped the patenting of the human genome. He does it in such an engaging style that it's almost like reading a legal thriller." - Professor Mark A. Lemley, Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology
"Remarkable. Contreras manages to make a book about the lawsuit that ended gene patenting in America read like a thriller. This book will not only inform you and stir your moral outrage, it will keep you on the edge of your seat." - Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day
This information about The Genome Defense was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jorge L. Contreras received his law degree from Harvard and teaches intellectual property, science policy and the law and ethics of genetics at the University of Utah, and has served on high‑level governmental advisory committees. His articles have appeared in Science, Nature, and Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, among others. He has been featured on NPR, PRI and BBC radio, and his opinions are cited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and the Washington Post.
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