Geron: Behemoth of the Stem Cell Race

Sacremento Bee reports on the importance of Geron and its patents for the race to acquire and license stem cell research technologies. It is a field in which there is a great deal of patent protection, as I wrote in a survey of the existing patents for a book Magnus, Caplan and I co-edited: Who Owns Life?. And now there are three billion dollars available for research that will in many cases produce licensing arrangements that filter automatically through Geron. This will be an interesting time for those who invest in biotechnology, but more interesting still for those who follow patent law in the life sciences, where the patent and trade offices in the US and European Union seem to have lost their minds. GM