One brave woman

SOMETIMES the bravery of one woman will stand the test of time for the good of all. Queensland grandmother and cancer survivor Yvonne D’Arcy is one such woman.

In 2013, the Herald said that Australians should thank the US Supreme Court for ruling unanimously that companies cannot own natural human genetic sequences.

But we warned that an Australian Federal Court ruling against D’Arcy had found the opposite and should be overturned.

D’Arcy was trying to stop the American biotech company Myriad Genetics retaining a patent – in effect a monopoly – over a gene sequence it had isolated and which was crucial to breast and ovarian cancer developing in many women.

At stake was the availability of better and cheaper genetic tests and treatments for women with the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes – the ones that prompted Angelina Jolie to have a double mastectomy.

This week, the high court joined its American counterpart by striking out Myriad’s patent for the BRCA-1 gene, thus bringing sense and hope to the genetic research debate.

The high court ruled that isolating a genetic sequence is a discovery, not an invention. The sequence was a product of nature, the court found, and it did not require human action to bring it into existence.

Therefore the sequence could not be patented.

Now Myriad and its Australian licensee, Genetic Technologies, cannot prevent others using the discovery.

For generations to come, Australian women will thank D’Arcy for persevering through two Federal Court losses before she risked all to go to the high court in Canberra.

And she had not even been to the nation’s capital before.