In April 2003, the United States Patent and Trade Office awarded a patent to Genset for its invention of a gene associated with psychiatric illness. “The invention,” read the patent, “provides means to identify compounds useful in the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and related diseases, means to determine the predisposition of individuals to said disease, as well as means for the disease diagnosis and prognosis.” The patented gene, on the long arm of chromosome 13, had been identified using DNA extracted from schizophrenia patients in a Quebecois population as part of a collaboration between Genset and Janssen Pharmaceuticals.

In the short term the implications of the patent, and related findings published in scientific journals, were unclear. For one thing, the same genetic variant had also been found among Genset's Argentine bipolar samples. Thus, rather than stabilizing the diagnostic entities – schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – that had been used in the company's search for genes linked to susceptibility to mental illness, the finding seemed to undermine them. Moreover, the basic unit of information that was the object of the patent was elusive: the list of possible entities ranged from “gene,” to “biallelic marker,” to “susceptibility locus,” to an “isolated nucleic acid” comprising the “open reading frame” that encoded the gene's protein product. Indeed, the meaning or usefulness of the word “gene” was no longer certain in the field of molecular biology: the postwar paradigm of the genetic code or blueprint was in question in the wake of the completion of the Human Genome Project.