09.15.2012 – GOLLYGEE!

An artist’s render of the Mars InSight probe

The next mission to Mars includes plans to explore beneath the planet’s surface. The plan is called InSight and is scheduled for launch in 2016. The goal is to collect information on the crust, mantle and core of Mars to determine how the planet has evolved. This should enhance any knowledge that is gained from Curiosity’s surface exploration.

From Science:

$425 million lander that would drill a few meters into Mars in order to probe its crust, mantle, and core will be NASA’s next major planetary science mission. In a teleconference late Monday, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld, announced that he has selected the InSight mission to Mars as NASA’s next cost-capped mission to explore the solar system. The craft will set a seismometer on the surface and send a temperature sensor down a drill hole to better understand how that rocky planet evolved from a nascent ball of magma.

InSight (Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) beat out two other finalists for NASA’s Discovery Program award. One would have splashed a craft onto a lake of liquefied natural gas on Titan, and another would have touched down on an active comet. InSight team members, led by planetary scientist W. Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, had made a strong pitch for their mission quickly returning the maximum science for the buck. InSight is based on the lander and spacecraft design that successfully delivered the Phoenix lander to Mars, they noted, which reduces both cost and risk. And while seismological studies have detailed Earth’s interior, the interiors of the three other rocky planets—Mercury, Venus, and Mars—have remained largely unknown. Mars, they argued, is large enough to have separated into crust, rocky mantle, and metallic core, but it has not been so tectonically active that it erased the record of that evolution.

I’m late with this update, but last month BRCA genes, which are linked to increased risk for breast and ovarian cancers, were ruled patentable for the second time. The decision will likely be appealed. From Science:

In today’s opinion, CAFC rules that Myriad’s patents on the genes themselves are valid “because each of the claimed molecules represents a nonnaturally occurring composition of matter.” This reasoning assumes that the patents are based on “nonnatural” segments of DNA extracted from cells, not DNA as it occurs in the nucleus. The court also rules that a method of screening for potential cancer therapeutics by tracking their effects on cell growth rates is patentable, contrary to the view of a lower court. But CAFC finds invalid the company’s claims on testing for cancer risk by comparing or analyzing DNA sequences because these methods are based on “abstract, mental steps” of logic that are not “transformative.”

One of the three deciding judges, William Bryson, dissents in part from the majority opinion, arguing that Myriad’s claims to the BRCA gene and gene fragments are not valid. He writes that he feared that if the majority opinion stands, it “will likely have broad consequences, such as preempting methods for whole-genome sequencing.”

The decision is not likely to fully satisfy either of the battling parties, although some biotech companies may be relieved to learn that the court did not wipe out any gene patents.

Myriad has not responded to an e-mail query about what it planned to do next. Attorney Daniel Ravicher of PUBPAT, who has led the legal battle against the BRCA patents, responds that his group has not “made any final decisions about what we’ll do. … But we are not satisfied with this result, and think the dissenting judge in the Court of Appeals decision today is correct that isolated human genes are not patentable.”

GOLLYGEE!

Date: 09.15.2012

mars is the next frontier

patented genes