According to the law in most states, health care providers own patients' medical records. But federal privacy law governs how that information can be used. And whether or not you can profit from your own medical data is murky. alicemoi/Getty Images/RooM RF hide caption
Smallpox virus, colorized and magnified in this micrograph 42,000 times, is the real concern for biologists working on a cousin virus — horsepox. They're hoping to develop a better vaccine against smallpox, should that human scourge ever be used as a bioweapon. Chris Bjornberg/Science Source hide caption
Biotechnologist Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute (a joint venture of MIT and Harvard University) was awarded a patent for CRISPR gene-editing technology in 2014. But two other scientists — Jennifer Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then of the University of Vienna — published their description of the underlying biology first. Susan Walsh/AP hide caption
Emmanuelle Charpentier (left) and Jennifer Doudna have a case for being the inventors of CRISPR-cas9, a transformative tool for gene editing. Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Medical geneticist Dr. Harry Ostrer (center) talks to the press outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. The court heard oral arguments on the highly charged question of whether human genes can be patented. Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images hide caption