Sir

The editing of one phrase in our statement about ownership of the human genome1 might lead readers to misconstrue our intention. In the sentence printed as “The intention of some university and commercial interests to patent the DNA sequences themselves, thereby staking claim to large numbers of human genes without necessarily having a full understanding of their functioning, strikes us as contrary to the essence of patent law”, the word “full” should have been deleted.

In fact, the full understanding of a gene is likely to take many decades to accomplish, and such a criterion would clearly be unreasonable with respect to what is patentable. Our point is that some level of understanding of specific function is important before a patent is awarded, as this is a necessary precursor to the claim of a substantial utility.

We also wish to comment that it is not the case, as implied in the Opinion article in the same issue2 that the main target of our statement was Celera Genomics. We were addressing important issues of broad public policy, and our focus was primarily the patent offices and the law courts, in which the validity of claims for gene-sequence patents will be decided.