Book Review: “The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA”

What happens when a rag-tag band of lawyers and civil liberty activists set out on a Quixotic mission to take on the U.S. government and the biotechnology industry to upend decades of established biotechnology patent law that had fueled unprecedented scientific progress in the fight against cancer? Find out in the book, “The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA,” authored by University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law Professor Jorge Contreras.

While the passage above may seem like a marketing blurb for a new Grisham-esque legal thriller, Contreras’ book and the story he tells are real, which in many ways makes for an even more compelling read about the behind–the-scenes strategies, machinations and inter-governmental discord that culminated in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics.

In this Inside Precision Medicine magazine article written by Loeb & Loeb FDA partner Jim Czaban, Jim interviews Contreras about his book, the legal and scientific controversies that underpinned this landmark Supreme Court case and the legal twists and turns that ensued.

Please click here to read the full interview article.