INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES IN GENOMICS

Controversy over intellectual property rights in the results of large- scale cDNA sequencing raises intriguing questions about the roles of t he public and private sectors in genomics research, and about who stan ds to benefit (and who stands to lose) from the private appropriation of genomic information, While the US Patent and Trademark Office has r ejected patent applications on cDNA fragments of unknown function from the National Institutes of Health, private firms have pursued three d istinct strategies for exploiting unpatented cDNA sequence information : exclusive licensing, non-exclusive licensing and dedication to the p ublic domain.