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Susan: My name is Susan Herman and I'm the President of the American Civil Liberties
Union usually known by its acronym, the ACLU. The ACLU was founded in 1920 right after World
War I in response to a number of very serious civil rights and civil liberties abuses that
had taken place during and right after World War I. One of which was Attorney General Mitchel
Palmer ordered what is now known as the Palmer Race where he rounded up and deported thousands
and thousands of non-Americans who were living in the United States including many Italians.
Deported them and detained them in what we thought was really an unreasonable detention.
Also during World War I there were a lot of prosecutions for people speaking and speaking
out against the war or against the draft. The ACLU was founded to defend freedom of
speech, due process and many other values. During our first decade during 1925, one of
the first major cases that the ACLU litigated was a case on behalf of a Tennessee school
teacher, Mr. Scopes. This was a case where Mr. Scopes had been prosecuted for teaching
evolution. He dared to teach Darwin in a state -- the state of Tennessee -- where what he
was supposed to be doing was teaching children that the story in the Bible of how the world
was created was literally true. Well we won that case in 1925 and then 80
years later we had to litigate a very similar case in Dover, Pennsylvania where a school
board decided that what should be taught in school was intelligence design, which as we
convinced the court is not really a scientific theory, it's a religion. I think you can already
see that our two organizations have a lot in common. I thought that you would be interested
in knowing one thing we're working on currently which is a case against United States Patent
Office. This is a case involving a habit that our patent office has developed of patenting
genes, as in parts of DNA. There is a company called Myriad Genetics
which figured out a test for mutations along two genes, brc 81 and brc 82. Mutations that
are correlated with increased risk of hereditary breast cancer or ovarian cancer. Now Myriad
Genetics developed a test and it's perfectly fair that they should be given a patent on
their test because they did create this very useful thing so that women can find out whether
they're at risk for cancer. However, the patent office in addition to
giving them a patent on the test itself, also gave them a patent on the human genes involved
which means that this company now owns those genes. If some other scientist wants to do
a test on those genes to try to see if they can figure out some different test perhaps
one that would be less costly, they're not permitted to do so -- under the terms of the
patent -- without permission from Myriad Genetics. We think that's a violation of our First Amendment
principles that it stifles scientific expression and scientific testing; that it also interferes
with the right of women to make their own decisions about what's happening with respect
to their health and their bodies because they can't even get a second opinion about their
risk for breast cancer or ovarian cancer. We've brought a law suit against the United
States Patents Office claiming that those patents are both illegal and unconstitutional.
If you'd like to know other things that the ACLU has been doing, we are a multi-issue
organization. You may be aware of the fact that during the past eight years we've been
very busy trying to resist the Bush administration's policies of detention and torture and overreaching
surveillance. You could look at our website, aclu.org to see what else we've been doing.
I think you can tell just from the couple of examples that I've given you that our organizations
do have common interest. I'm glad that we now have discovered each other; I hope that
we'll be able to collaborate in the future, and I wish you a very successful conference.
[Gratie 04:03].