Source: Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics
source confidence: High status: Useful updated 2026-08-11
Summary
The Supreme Court's 2013 Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics opinion is the primary legal source for the ruling that naturally occurring DNA segments are not patent eligible merely because they have been isolated, while cDNA can be patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.
Useful Claims
- The case was decided on June 13, 2013.
- The opinion says Myriad discovered the location and sequence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and obtained patents based on that discovery.
- The Court held that naturally occurring DNA is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.
- The Court held that cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.
- The opinion clarifies that the case did not involve method claims, new applications of knowledge about BRCA1 and BRCA2, or altered DNA sequences.
Reliability Notes
This is the authoritative legal source for the patent holding and the Court's framing of Myriad's contribution: cite it as Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013). The URL is the Court's own bound volume of the United States Reports, in which this opinion begins at page 576; the volume PDF is large, so page 576 is the locator to jump to.
Justia is an accurate and convenient reading copy, but it is a private republisher under no obligation to keep any particular URL alive. The Court's own volume is both permanent and the text of record, so this page needs no archive snapshot. Justia's version remains available at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/569/576/.
The claims above are drawn from the syllabus and opening of the opinion. They are not quoted here because the source is a PDF, which the capture tooling deliberately refuses to convert to text rather than store extraction noise; anyone adding a ## Verbatim section should quote from the opinion text directly.