Medical Mind Control

By Kelley Luckstein

The ACLU rarely involves itself with patent cases, so it was surprising when the civil liberties group filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to invalidate a patent in the case of Mayo v. Prometheus. Mainstream press coverage portrayed the dispute between two medical testing labs as a mundane argument over "individualized medicine," but to the ACLU, what’s at stake is nothing less than the freedom of thought.