United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet has invalidated seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, whose mutations have been linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

The ruling was somewhat unexpected by legal observers as the US Supreme Court upheld patents on living organisms in 1980 and about 20 percent of human genes have been patented.

The argument against the patents, brought by individual patients and medical organizations, and joined by the American Civil Liverties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. They argued that genes are outside of the realm of things that can be patented. Such patents stifle research and innovation and limit testing options.

The patent holders, Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, claimed that the work of isolating the DNA from the body transforms it and makes it patentable.

Judge Sweet found that the patents involved a “law of nature” and thus were improperly granted. He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”