I had missed the news that the Massachusetts health care experiment, the prototype for the national reform law, was going down the tubes. So my eyes immediately gravitated to the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning whose headline warned about the coming “train wreck” in the Bay State, soon to be followed by “runaway spending, price controls, even limits on care and medical licensing.”
Gooz News
Bilski ruling may reveal frivolity of certain biotech patents
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous and somewhat surprising decision limiting the scope of business methods patents. The ruling in In Re Bilski upheld a lower court decision that invalidated two inventors’ patent on a method of hedging weather-related risk in energy prices. The high court said it couldn’t be granted because the process wasn’t “tied to a particular machine or apparatus” and it didn’t “transform a particular article into a different state or thing.”
New NIH rules leave universities to enforce integrity of researchers
The National Institutes of Health proposed new conflict-of-interest rules today that will do nothing to limit financial ties between government-funded researchers and private industry and leaves university administrators in charge of policing the arrangements.