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Bioinformatics Law: Legal Issues for Computational Biology in the Post-Genome Era

To what extent can law serve as a tool that promotes the progress of science? In the field of bioinformatics—where innovations can help reduce healthcare costs, protect patient privacy, and improve health outcomes—the stakes are unquestionably high. As a discipline, bioinformatics involves the development and application of information technology in the biological sciences. Seeking to capitalize on the benefits that flow from integrating informatics techniques with biological and medical data, public and private stakeholders throughout the healthcare industry are investing billions of dollars in bioinformatics and its sister discipline, medical informatics, which involves the development and application of information technology to clinical medicine and biomedical research. The law governing bioinformatics is as complex and nuanced as the science. Consider the example of computational methods used to study the genetic foundations of disease. Such research is characteristic of work performed by bioinformaticists—specifically, using mathematical algorithms to mine genetic sequences to analyze whether genetic variations correlate with