In “Company seeks to make sperm banks safer,” a recent article in the Boston Globe, Bill of Health blogger Dov Fox recently weighed in on new companies that propose to screen sperm donor DNA in an effort to reduce the chance that children conceived with donated sperm will have childhood genetic diseases: Dov Fox, an assistant…
Bill of Health blogger Dov Fox was quoted in the recent article “Genetic-testing patent raises concerns about ‘designer babies’.” “‘Some people might say this is in some respects similar to dating websites to the extent you look for traits in somebody you want to have children with,’ said Dov Fox, a law professor at the…
By Matthew L Baum “Examining the intersection of law and health care, biotech & bioethics” – the subtitle of the Bill of Health blog. I approach this intersection like many of my fellow students: outfitted with the tools and spectacles of a specific discipline. Whether that is health law, policy, medicine, engineering, philosophy, genetics, or…
By The Petrie-Flom Center In the first installment of our new collaboration with Genetics in Medicine, we are highlighting an article released yesterday discussing 23andMe’s controversial “designer baby” patent, which has already gotten quite a bit of attention. Here’s the press release, and an exclusive commentary from Sigrid Sterckx, one of the article’s authors, can…
By Sigrid Sterckx, as part of our collaboration with Genetics in Medicine Yesterday, 3 October, an article I wrote with three co-authors about a controversial US patent was published by the (Nature) journal Genetics in Medicine. The patent, granted last week to the Californian Direct-To-Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe, is entitled ‘Gamete donor selection based on…
Check out blogger Dov Fox‘s new op-ed over at HuffPo discussing 23andMe’s Designer Baby Patent. Here’s a quick taste: Even if 23andMe doesn’t bring its donor selection technique to market, there’s still reason to resist granting such patents in the first place. Patents do more, after all, than incentive innovators to disclose their inventions to the…
By Michelle Meyer In late May, I wrote the following: Yesterday, the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, an international consortium that pools and conducts social science research on existing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, and on whose Advisory Board I sit, published (online ahead of print) the results of its first study in Science. That…
This post is part of Bill of Health’s symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. Background on the symposium is here. You can call up all of the symposium contributions by clicking here. —MM By Daniel C. Barth-Jones In Part 1 and Part 2 of this symposium contribution I wrote about a number of…
By Michelle Meyer This post is part of Bill of Health‘s symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. Background on the symposium is here. You can call up all of the symposium contributions by clicking here. —MM Daniel C. Barth-Jones, M.P.H., Ph.D., is a HIV and infectious disease epidemiologist. His work in…
Bill of Health blogger Dov Fox was featured in a recent National Geographic article on genetics and genealogy. Dov Fox, an assistant professor of law at the University of San Diego who specializes in genetic and bioethical issues, told me that it’s only a matter of time before genetic genealogy leads to lawsuits regarding fidelity, paternity, and…
