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We have been reporting for more than a year about the case of Williams v. Quest Diagnostics (the parent company of Athena Diagnostics), in which the plaintiff has sued Athena…
As part of its defense of a class action lawsuit that began in 2014, a genetic genealogy company (or DNA ancestry company as they are sometimes called) is challenging the…
We mentioned in January that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court’s earlier decision to grant a motion to dismiss and is instead allowing the case of Chadam v. Palo Alto Unified School District to move forward. At that time, we explained that this case should remain…
In its March 22, 2017 decision in ACB v. Thomson Medical, the Court of Appeal of Singapore (the city-state’s supreme court) approved an award of damages for loss of “genetic affinity” against a fertility clinic that negligently fertilized a mother’s egg with sperm from an anonymous donor rather than her…
CRISPR-Cas9 editing of the genome As we noted early last year, a major dispute over patent rights to CRISPR-Cas systems broke out in January 2016 between Feng Zhang, the Broad Institute, and MIT on one side and Jennifer Doudna and the University of California-Berkeley as well as Emmanuelle Charpentier, Krzysztof…
On January 18, 2017, in one of its last official acts, the outgoing Obama administration issued a final revised version of the Common Rule—the regulation that governs the treatment of human subjects in all federally funded research. This was the culmination of a process that began in 2011 when the…
Foreword by John Conley Back on May 31, 2016, Contributing Editor Jennifer Wagner wrote a lengthy report on the newly filed case of Williams v. Quest Diagnostics, et al. As Jen recounted, plaintiff Amy Williams sued Athena Diagnostics and its corporate parent, Quest Diagnostics, alleging that Athena negligently misclassified a genetic…
About a year ago we reported on a case involving allegations of genetic discrimination by a school district in California. According to the allegations, in fall 2012 the Palo Alto Unified School District used genetic information regarding cystic fibrosis in deciding to transfer a student away from his neighborhood school…
