A detailed account of patent law that, against all odds, turns out to be fascinating.
A superb lesson on patents in general and the grotesque American patent system in particular.
Everyone agrees that patents are essential to allow inventors to profit from their inventions, but what is “patentable” remains a subject of fierce debate, notes Contreras, who teaches intellectual property, science policy, and the law and ethics of genetics at the University of Utah. New machines, methods, or materials qualify, but naturally occurring substances don’t. As such, a botanist who discovers a previously unknown mushroom can’t patent it because he only found it; he didn’t invent it. Yet, somehow, genes qualify. During the 1970s and ’80s, genetic engineering exploded when courts began approving patents for genetically modified organisms, and entrepreneurs pushed the envelope by asking for and receiving patents on sequences of human DNA. “By late 1996,” writes Contreras, “the journal Nature reported that more than 350 new gene patent applications had been filed. Genes that could help to diagnose predispositions to more and more health conditions.” There was no shortage of religious and scientific argument in opposition, but gene patents were legal, and changing a law requires legal arguments. Although it had never litigated a patent case, the ACLU decided in 2009 to take action and chose a target to maximize public interest. It focused on a woman who had a gene that put her at increased risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer, the test for which was in the hands of a company that owned the patent, monopolized the diagnostic test, and set a high price that insurance often did not cover. Having set the scene, 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.
A detailed account of patent law that, against all odds, turns out to be fascinating.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61620-968-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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