Gene patents

Guess what's a terrible idea? I mean, the market has spoken!

Some babies have seizures. That's pretty bad for anyone, but especially a baby, right? So if you're a doctor, you're probably pretty interested in getting an accurate diagnosis for the cause of these seizures. Unfortunately, the intellectual property rights to this genetic sequence is owned by a company called Genetic Technologies, and they have already threatened to sue hospitals for testing for breast cancer mutations the company claims to "own."

Maybe Barack might consider forcing some of our favorite patent trolls (like drug and biotech companies) to consider patent pools so that we can derive some benefit from all this groundbreaking research.