A recent Supreme Court ruling disallowed the patent of what naturally occurring thing?

On June 13, the Supreme Court ruled that companies cannot patent naturally occurring human genes or parts of them, reversing 30 years of awarded patents (about 8,000 patents), and will undoubtedly impact the high-tech and medicine industries.

As CBS News reported, one such reversal includes patents held by Myriad Genetics Inc. on a breast cancer test recently brought into the spotlight by actress Angelina Jolie, who had a double mastectomy because of one of the genes involved in this case.

"We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated," Thomas said.