The Gene Patent Question: Wendover Got the Monopoly Right—and Almost Everything Around It Too Simple
Wendover Productions presents a compelling moral argument: companies should not be allowed to own nature, particularly when human health is at stake. But its explanation of the law, the history of gene patents, and the commercial power of Myriad Genetics is considerably less reliable than its confident storytelling suggests.
The biggest problem is not that the video takes a position. It is that it repeatedly turns narrow legal decisions into sweeping conclusions. Myriad's American testing monopoly becomes a worldwide monopoly over human genes. A Supreme Court ruling about specific DNA claims becomes the virtual end of human gene patents. And a decision about an engineered bacterium becomes a precedent specifically authorizing patents on genetically modified animals.
These are not minor technicalities. They change what the story actually means.
Myriad's monopoly was American—and very real
Here is what Wendover gets right: Myriad did use its patents to eliminate competition in the United States. A 2014 academic review documents that nine laboratories offering BRCA testing withdrew from the American market after Myriad asserted its patent rights. Myriad became the country's only commercial BRCA testing laboratory.
But the same review explicitly states that its testing monopoly was never established in any other country. The video’s description of Myriad as the only company worldwide permitted to do anything with BRCA genes is false. It confuses a powerful American commercial monopoly with universal ownership of genetic material.
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That distinction does not excuse Myriad. By 2013, the company had performed more than one million BRCA tests and generated over $2.8 billion in revenue. Its monopoly had substantial financial consequences, and the Supreme Court itself documented how Myriad used legal threats and infringement proceedings to force competing laboratories out of the market.
Competition eventually returned. A subsequent study documented that the combined BRCA1/BRCA2 testing price fell from approximately $4,000 to less than $400 after the Supreme Court decision and the entry of competing laboratories. That is meaningful evidence that exclusive patent rights had restricted competition.
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But the story did not end with the patents.
In November 2016, STAT reported that Myriad still controlled approximately 85% of the American BRCA testing market, despite around a dozen competitors. Its advantage included a proprietary database containing clinical interpretations of more than 17,000 BRCA variants accumulated over two decades of testing.
The company was now defending its market position through its data advantage, arguing that competitors' tests were inaccurate. Researchers whose work Myriad cited disputed whether their findings supported those allegations.
This is the more interesting business story: eliminating patent exclusivity did not eliminate Myriad's competitive advantage. A substantial part of its market power had migrated from patents into privately controlled medical information.
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Wendover also claims that the actual testing process cost only a fraction of the $4,000 price. It supplies no cost breakdown establishing that assertion. A 2010 comparative study found no obvious price premium attributable to exclusive patents in its chosen comparison with colorectal cancer testing, although that earlier analysis cannot settle the effects of subsequent competition.
The evidence supports a strong criticism of Myriad's exclusive business model. It does not establish that every dollar above the laboratory's immediate operating costs was monopoly profit.
The Supreme Court did not abolish gene patents
The video describes the 2013 ruling as "virtually ending the process of human genome patents."
That is an extraordinary exaggeration.
The Supreme Court considered nine composition claims from three Myriad patents. It ruled that naturally occurring DNA sequences could not become patentable merely because researchers isolated them from the human body. But it also explicitly held that complementary DNA, or cDNA, could qualify for patent protection because it is synthetically created rather than naturally occurring.
More importantly, the Court expressly declined to decide three other questions:
- Patent claims covering methods of genetic testing.
- Patents covering new applications of knowledge about BRCA1 and BRCA2.
- Patents covering DNA whose naturally occurring nucleotide sequence had been altered.
Those questions remained outside the decision.
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Myriad also retained a substantial patent portfolio. Before the Supreme Court ruling, the company publicly stated that it held more than 500 claims across 23 patents, most of which were not challenged in the ACLU lawsuit.
After the decision, Myriad sued several newly competing laboratories, including Ambry Genetics, Gene by Gene, Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp, asserting other surviving patents. Those disputes continued into 2015.
The distinction matters: the Court invalidated particular patent claims, not the entire concept of commercial genetic inventions.
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A decade later, three researchers examining the case in the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics reached a particularly inconvenient conclusion for Wendover's narrative: Myriad's practical impact on patenting practices had been modest, both inside and outside the United States. Broader developments in patent law and biotechnology had shaped the landscape considerably more than the decision alone.
That is not what a virtual end to human genome patents looks like.
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There is another distinction the video misses. Patent eligibility is not the same as automatic patent approval. A genetically modified organism or synthetic DNA sequence must still satisfy requirements involving novelty, usefulness, non-obviousness and adequate disclosure.
Calling a genetically modified apple fair game for patenting skips most of the legal examination. Modification alone does not guarantee a patent.
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The 21% statistic is not ownership of 21% of your body
Wendover states that approximately 21% of the human genome had been patented.
The figure has a legitimate research basis, but the way it is presented is misleading.
A 2013 study in Genome Medicine examined sequences appearing in US patent claims. Using stringent matching criteria, the researchers found that 21% of human genes matched sequences in patent claims. Using more permissive matching parameters, the figure rose to 41%.
Those are measurements of gene sequences matching patent claims, not evidence that companies owned 21% of all human DNA or controlled every possible use of those genes.
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A 2006 National Academies report provides another important qualification. It estimated that approximately 20% of human genes were explicitly claimed in US patents, distributed across 1,156 different patent holders.
The committee specifically warned that these numbers alone did not establish a patent thicket or blocking problem. Researchers needed to examine the actual patent claims, licensing arrangements and relationships between patent holders before reaching that conclusion.
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This is precisely what the video fails to do.
A patent claim covering a particular DNA sequence is not automatically ownership of every use of an entire gene. Some claims cover specific fragments, probes, diagnostic applications or synthetic molecules. Their actual legal reach depends on their wording.
The apple analogy makes this distinction disappear. It encourages viewers to imagine that a company owns a piece of the human body in the same way it might own an exclusive right to manufacture a consumer product.
The legal reality is considerably more complicated.
The 1980 animal-patent ruling was not an animal case
Wendover states that the US Supreme Court decided in 1980 that genetically modified animals could be patented if sufficiently altered from their natural form.
That is not what happened.
The 1980 case, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, concerned a genetically engineered bacterium capable of breaking down components of crude oil. The Supreme Court held that this human-made microorganism could qualify as patentable subject matter because it possessed characteristics not found in naturally occurring bacteria.
It did not decide a case involving genetically modified animals.
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The US Patent Office subsequently extended that reasoning to animals. In 1987, its Board of Patent Appeals considered a genetically modified Pacific Coast oyster in Ex parte Allen. The Patent Office then announced that nonnaturally occurring, non-human multicellular organisms, including animals, could qualify as patentable subject matter.
That is the actual legal development Wendover should have described.
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European law also has important qualifications. The European Union's Biotechnology Directive excludes animal varieties, essentially biological breeding processes and modifications likely to cause animal suffering without substantial medical benefit.
There is no universal legal permission to patent any modified animal simply because someone changed its DNA.
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The AquAdvantage salmon example contains another chronological error.
Health Canada approved the genetically engineered salmon for commercial sale in May 2016. However, AquaBounty's subsequent SEC filing records its first commercial sales in June 2017: five tonnes of salmon fillets harvested from its Panama facility and sold to Canadian customers.
Approval in 2016 was not the same as reaching supermarket shelves that year.
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The environmental discussion also omits an important part of the regulatory assessment.
The FDA's approval required land-based production facilities, prohibited ocean net pens, and imposed multiple physical containment measures. The fish intended for food production were required to be an all-female, reproductively sterile population.
The FDA's environmental assessment relied on these physical and biological safeguards, not simply on computer models suggesting ordinary salmon would outbreed escaped engineered fish.
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There is also a later commercial development worth knowing.
AquaBounty announced in December 2024 that it would wind down its remaining fish-farming operation because it lacked sufficient liquidity. In March 2025, it sold its Canadian farms and its intellectual property relating to genetically engineered salmon.
Its 2026 financial filings describe the company's exit from fish-rearing operations and continuing financial uncertainty.
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This does not establish that the salmon was unsafe or that the technology cannot succeed under another owner. It does establish that patent protection and regulatory approval did not guarantee a commercially sustainable business.
The human gene-editing argument confuses patenting with permission
The final section makes an even more consequential legal mistake.
Wendover says that the 1980 decision permitting patents on genetically modified animals specifically excluded humans, meaning human gene editing could not be patented in the United States.
The explicit exclusion actually came from Congress in 2011, through Section 33 of the America Invents Act. It prohibits patents on claims directed to or encompassing a human organism.
That is not a blanket prohibition on patenting gene-editing tools, techniques or methods.
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The distinction is not theoretical. In 2019, the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics documented that the US Patent Office routinely issued patents protecting gene-editing technology. The University of California had announced its eighth US patent covering CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
The patentability of a tool used to edit human DNA is not the same legal question as patenting an entire genetically modified human being.
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Europe had also addressed part of this question long before the video. The European Union's 1998 Biotechnology Directive explicitly excluded patents on processes for modifying the germline genetic identity of human beings.
That does not settle every country's approach or every form of gene editing. But it makes the suggestion that most jurisdictions had not considered the question an inadequate account of the international legal landscape.
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There is an even more fundamental problem with the video's closing argument.
A patent does not give its owner permission to perform the patented procedure.
It gives the owner the right to exclude others from making, using or selling the claimed invention. It does not automatically authorize clinical use, override medical regulation or establish that an experimental procedure is ethically acceptable.
The American Medical Association's analysis makes this distinction explicit. Patent offices examine inventions under patent law; other authorities regulate safety, legality and clinical use.
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Wendover's final question asks whether it is ethical to allow patented human gene editing.
But patenting a gene-editing technology and permitting someone to use it on a human embryo are different decisions. One concerns intellectual property. The other concerns medicine, ethics, safety and regulation.
Conflating them creates a false choice between encouraging scientific discovery and permitting unrestricted human genetic engineering.
Golden Rice: a humanitarian promise is not a proven result
Golden Rice is presented as evidence that patents can help deliver important technologies to poor populations.
The idea has merit, but the video makes two important omissions.
First, its claim that vitamin A deficiency kills up to two million people annually needs qualification.
A 1992 study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization estimated that improved vitamin A nutrition could prevent approximately one to two million deaths annually among children aged one to four in high-risk developing countries.
That was an estimate of potentially preventable deaths based on supplementation research, not a direct count of people observed dying from vitamin A deficiency every year. Wendover removes the distinction.
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Second, Golden Rice did not emerge from a simple arrangement in which one patent owner generously decided to distribute seeds for free.
An OECD investigation found that an initial intellectual-property review identified 70 patents that might affect the project. Further examination established that only 12 were actually relevant, six of which were held by Syngenta.
The humanitarian distribution arrangement required negotiations, licensing and a specific intellectual-property management plan involving the researchers and private companies.
It was a negotiated solution to a complicated patent landscape, not an automatic benefit of patent ownership.
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And the nutritional outcome remains a separate question.
PhilRice's February 2025 information document stated that an independent nutritional study was still planned to determine whether Malusog Rice actually improves individuals' vitamin A status.
The same document reported that commercial propagation had been suspended following an April 2024 Philippine Court of Appeals decision, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court.
Golden Rice may eventually provide meaningful benefits. But a humanitarian licensing arrangement and a promising nutritional design are not proof of a successful population-level health intervention.
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Monsanto's seeds are not simply Netflix subscriptions
The video argues that Monsanto's restrictions on saving and sharing patented seeds are essentially the same as Netflix restricting the sharing of an account.
That analogy is convenient, but it hides the most important legal distinction.
Seeds reproduce.
In 2013, the US Supreme Court decided Bowman v. Monsanto. Farmer Vernon Bowman purchased Roundup Ready soybeans, planted them, harvested new seeds and saved some for subsequent planting.
The Court held that patent exhaustion did not give him the right to reproduce Monsanto's patented invention without permission. It affirmed damages of $84,456.
The decision concerned deliberate reproduction of patented soybeans, not every possible situation involving farmers and self-replicating products. The Court explicitly limited its holding to the circumstances before it.
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This is not simply a restriction on sharing something purchased. It is a legal right to prevent the reproduction of a patented biological invention.
The Netflix comparison strips away the central economic and legal issue: a farmer's harvested crop can become the next generation of the patented product.
The video then makes another unsupported leap. It argues that farmers overwhelmingly choose Monsanto seeds because the seeds make more money than they cost.
High adoption of genetically modified corn does not establish that conclusion. Adoption measures how widely a technology is used, not the net financial return received by every farmer.
The video supplies no farm-level profitability analysis, no comparison of alternative seed costs and no evidence establishing that adoption reflects an absence of economic pressure or dependence.
"It's just simple math," the creator says.
But no actual calculation follows.
The verdict
Wendover has identified a legitimate public-interest problem: patent rights can restrict access to important medical technologies, and Myriad demonstrated how exclusive patent claims could be used to control an American genetic-testing market.
That argument survives scrutiny.
The surrounding explanation does not survive nearly as well.
The video exaggerates Myriad's geographic monopoly, overstates the reach of the Supreme Court decision, confuses a bacterium patent ruling with an animal patent decision, misrepresents the American restriction on patenting human organisms, and conflates patent ownership with permission to conduct human genetic experiments.
Its Golden Rice mortality statistic loses an important qualification. Its salmon example confuses regulatory approval with commercial availability. Its agricultural argument substitutes adoption figures for evidence of profitability.
These failures matter because the video is asking viewers to form opinions about the future ownership of human genetic technology.
That subject deserves more than a collection of simplified legal stories and emotionally persuasive examples.
The danger is not that Wendover questions whether companies should own discoveries. The danger is that it leaves viewers with an inaccurate understanding of what companies can own, what courts have prohibited, and what the law still permits.
The ethical debate over genetic engineering is important. It should not have to rely on misleading legal explanations to make its case.
References
1. The Gene Patent Question — Wendover Productions — Original video. The primary source for the claims, examples and arguments examined here.
2. Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. — US Supreme Court, June 13, 2013. Establishes exactly what the Court prohibited, what remained patent-eligible and which questions it expressly declined to decide.
3. After Myriad: Genetic Testing in the Wake of Recent Supreme Court Decisions about Gene Patents — Current Genetic Medicine Reports, 2014. Documents Myriad's American testing monopoly, its international limitations, surviving patents and subsequent litigation.
4. The Myriad Decision at 10 — Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, August 2024. Provides a decade-later assessment showing that the ruling's practical impact on patenting was more limited than its contemporary reputation suggested.
5. Reaping the Benefits of Genomic and Proteomic Research — National Academies Press, 2006. Provides the original context for estimates of human genes covered by patents and cautions against treating patent counts as evidence of monopoly or restricted access.
6. Pervasive Sequence Patents Cover the Entire Human Genome — Genome Medicine, March 2013. Explains the methodology behind the 21% estimate and demonstrates how different sequence-matching criteria produce substantially different coverage figures.
7. USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, Section 2105 — United States Patent and Trademark Office. Documents the actual history of patent eligibility for engineered microorganisms, animals and human organisms.
8. Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, Section 33 — United States Congress, September 16, 2011. Establishes the actual statutory prohibition on patent claims directed to or encompassing human organisms.
9. Is Gene Editing Patentable? — AMA Journal of Ethics, December 2019. Explains the difference between patenting gene-editing technologies and authorizing their clinical use.
10. Directive 98/44/EC on the Legal Protection of Biotechnological Inventions — European Parliament and Council, July 6, 1998. Establishes European restrictions on patents involving human germline modification and certain animal modifications.
11. Bowman v. Monsanto Co. — US Supreme Court, May 13, 2013. Establishes the limits of patent exhaustion when a purchaser reproduces patented seeds.
12. AquAdvantage Salmon Fact Sheet — US Food and Drug Administration. Details the actual containment, sterility and environmental safeguards imposed on the genetically engineered salmon.
13. AquaBounty Technologies, 2025 Annual Report — US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2026 filing. Documents the company's sale of its salmon intellectual property and Canadian farms, and the financial circumstances behind its withdrawal from fish production.
14. Vitamin A Deficiency and Attributable Mortality Among Under-5-Year-Olds — Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 1992. Establishes the original modeled estimate of deaths potentially preventable through improved vitamin A nutrition.
15. Collaborative Mechanisms for Intellectual Property Management in the Life Sciences — OECD, 2011. Documents the Golden Rice patent landscape and the negotiated licensing arrangements required for humanitarian distribution.
16. Malusog Rice Frequently Asked Questions — Philippine Rice Research Institute, February 2025. Records the regulatory suspension of commercial propagation and the outstanding need for independent nutritional-impact research.