Jorge L. Contreras | |
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| Born | New York, NY |
| Education | Rice University (BA, BSE) Harvard University (JD) |
| Employer(s) | American University Washington University in St. Louis University of Utah |
Jorge L. Contreras is an American legal scholar who is an authority on intellectual property law, technical standardization and the law and policy of human genomics.
Contreras was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and spent his childhood in South Florida and Texas. He attended Rice University in Houston, Texas. [1] At Rice, Contreras held the elected offices of Rice Program Council (RPC) treasurer and Student Association treasurer, and was a member of the Marching Owl Band (MOB). During the summer of 1987 he studied English literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Contreras attended Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991, where he earned his JD degree and served as an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology and worked for Professor Laurence Tribe.
Contreras currently holds the rank of Presidential Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, [2] with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He also serves as a Senior Policy Fellow [3] at American University Washington College of Law. He has held prior academic appointments at American University Washington College of Law (2011–13) and Washington University School of Law (2010-11). For the past two years [ when? ] Contreras has taught a short course on international patent licensing and litigation at the East China University for Political Science and Law in Shanghai (ECUPL{{) and served as a TILT/TILEC fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands during 2018.
Prior to entering academia, Contreras was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr LLP, [4] where he practiced transactional intellectual property law in Boston, MA, Washington, DC and London, UK. He clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Phillips of the Texas Supreme Court during the 1991-92 court term.
Contreras's research focuses on patent and antitrust law, science policy, and technology standardization and innovation.
The Genomic Commons
Contreras was among the first scholars to conceptualize the vast collection of publicly-available genomic data that emerged after the Human Genome Project within the theoretical framework of the knowledge commons [, [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] a construct first developed by Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess [10] and later expanded by Brett Frischmann, Michael Madison and Kathleen Strandburg [11]
Gene Patents
Contreras's book The Genome Defense, recounts the untold story of AMP v. Myriad, the ACLU's unlikely lawsuit that ended gene patenting in America. Based on over a hundred interviews and thousands of pages of court and agency documentation, the book explains this complex case and subject in a manner intended for the general reader.
On September 16, 2021, The New York Times included The Genome Defense in its list of "11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season". [12]
In June, 2020, Contreras testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property [13] regarding issues of patent quality. In addition, he has served as the U.S. government's expert on international intellectual property licensing in two major international transfer pricing cases, including Amazon.com v. Commissioner [14] and Coca-Cola Co. v. Commissioner, [15] the latter of which resulted in a $3 billion tax recovery by the government.
Contreras has served on numerous governmental advisory committees and councils, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils, the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and the Advisory Council of the National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS). He served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) delegation to the international Belmont Forum on earth data governance and currently serves on the Oversight Board of the University of Utah’s Veterans’ Administration Genealogy Project.
In addition to government service, he has advised the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in various capacities, served on different committees of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), sits on the advisory board of the American Antitrust Institute, and has served for two decades in the leadership of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Section of Science and Technology Law, including five years as co-chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists.
Contreras has received awards and recognition for his scholarship, including the University of Utah's Distinguished Researcher Award (2020), the Joseph Rossman Memorial Award from the Patent and Trademark Office Society for the best yearly paper published in the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society (2021-2022), the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law Faculty Scholarship Award (2018–19), the Daniels Fund Leadership in Ethics Education Award (2018), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Education Award (2018), the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law Early Career Teaching Award (2015–16) and the Elizabeth Payne Cubberly Faculty Scholarship Award at American University (2014).
John Craig Venter is an American scientist. He is known for leading one of the first draft sequences of the human genome and led the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). He was the co-founder of Human Longevity Inc. and Synthetic Genomics. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010". In 2012, Venter was honored with Dan David Prize for his contribution to genome research. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's advisory board.
Eric Steven Lander is an American mathematician and geneticist who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Eric Lander is founding director emeritus of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Michael Allen Geist is a Canadian academic, and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of four books on copyright law and privacy law, and he edits two newsletters on Canadian information technology and privacy law.
The Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property is the result of a project commissioned by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, London, England, and is intended as a positive statement of what good intellectual property policy is. The Charter was issued in 2004.
Charles Thomas Caskey, also known as C. Thomas Caskey, was an American internist who has been a medical Geneticist and biomedical researcher and entrepreneur. He was a Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, and served as editor of the Annual Review of Medicine from 2001 to 2019. He was a member of the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, the Encyclopedia of Molecular Medicine and numerous other medical and scientific journals.
Scott Milne Matheson Jr. is an American lawyer and jurist serving since 2010 as a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Michael W. Carroll is a law professor and director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University's Washington College of Law. Carroll is one of the founding Board Members of Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share. He also is a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science PLOS and served on the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Research Data and Information from 2008 to 2013.
The S.J. Quinney College of Law is a professional graduate law school under the University of Utah. Located in Salt Lake City, Utah, the school was established in 1913. It is a member of the Association of American Law Schools and is accredited by the American Bar Association.
David Grant Campbell is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Arizona.
David Sam is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Utah.
Samir Kumar Brahmachari is an Indian biophysicist and Former Director General of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and Former Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India. He is the Founder Director of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi and the Chief Mentor of Open Source for Drug Discovery (OSDD) Project. He is the recipient of J.C Bose Fellowship Award, DST (2012). In addition, he is one of the featured researchers in the India Cancer Research Database developed by Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB), Bangalore with support from the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.
Aravinda Chakravarti is a human geneticist and expert in computational biology, and Director of the Center For Human Genetics & Genomics at New York University. He was the 2008 President of the American Society of Human Genetics. Chakravarti became a co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genome Research in 1995, and of the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics' in 2005.
The term "knowledge commons" refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet. What distinguishes a knowledge commons from a commons of shared physical resources is that digital resources are non-subtractible; that is, multiple users can access the same digital resources with no effect on their quantity or quality.
Judith M. Billings served as a judge for the Utah Court of Appeals from 1987 to 2008 and is a current adjunct professor for the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. In addition, she still works as an active senior judge, mediator, arbitrator and a faculty member of the National Judicial College.
Lawrence B. Schook was the vice president for research at the University of Illinois. He oversaw the $1 billion research portfolio across all three campuses. A scholar in comparative genomics and the exploitation of genomic diversity to understand traits and disease, Dr. Schook focuses his research on genetic resistance to disease, regenerative medicine, and using genomics to create animal models for biomedical research. He led the international pig genome-sequencing project, which produced a draft of the pig genome allowing researchers to offer insights into diseases that afflict pigs and humans.
B K Thelma commonly known as Bittianda Kuttapa Thelma is a professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Delhi, South Campus, New Delhi, India. She is the Principal investigator and Co-ordinator of the Centre of excellence on Genomes Sciences and Predictive Medicine funded by the Govt. of India. She is also the Co-ordinator of a major project on newborn screening for inborn errors of metabolism in Delhi state which aims to demonstrate the feasibility of mandatory screening of newborns in the country and to generate epidemiological data for the testable IEMs in the genetically distinct Indian population, for the first time.
Asis Datta is an Indian biochemist, molecular biologist and genetic engineer, known for his research on genetically modified foods and food nutritional security. He was the founding Director of the National Institute of Plant Genome Research and is credited with the discovery of genes that assist in extended preservation of fruits and vegetables. He is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, the highest Indian award and in the Science category, and was awarded the fourth highest civilian award of the Padma Shri, by the Government of India, in 1999. In 2008, he was included again in the Republic Day Honours list for the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.
Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013), was a Supreme Court case, which decided that "a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.” However, as a "bizarre conciliatory prize" the Court allowed patenting of complementary DNA, which contains exactly the same protein-coding base pair sequence as the natural DNA, albeit with introns removed.
Arti K. Rai is an American legal intellectual and former public official. She is currently the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke Law School. She was previously a member of the Presidential transition of Barack Obama and subsequently served in the Department of Commerce as a Patent Office advisor. During the early 2000s, Rai was one of the leading academic advocates of patent reform, particularly the creation of a robust post-grant opposition system for U.S. patents.
Hiram E. Chodosh is an American lawyer who is the 5th and current president of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
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