Slashdot Mirror
Dolly Cloning Method Patented
Cy Guy writes "The BBC is reporting that Roslin Institute, along with two government agencies that helped fund the research, has been awarded a UK patent for the technology used to produce a clone of Dolly the Sheep in 1996.
Roslin has already been sold an exclusive license for the technology to the U.S. company Geron for $45M.
"
They are not patenting the fact that someone can be cloned. They are patenting their METHOD OF CLONING! There is a significant difference between the two, and I think ultimately it is a supportable case for such a patent.
10 years from now, we could very well see the same thing that happened with WAP happen with this. I can see now that there will be a $1000 charge going out to every kid that cloned his dead cat, or the guy who has a clone of a supermodel chained up in his basement. It is a shame that patents don't expire once the information is to a point where it becomes useful to the world.
I think that only GOD should EVER be able to patent a biological process. At the same time, I think these people should be recognized for their hard work. They should get some large award for their efforts (> $1,000,000) and the world should share their discovery.
jon
Just one thing is missing:
WE WANNA SEE *YOU* NAKED AND PETRIFIED!!
LOCK UP th' WOMEN and CHILDREN!
KEEP your DAUGHTERS at HOME TONITE!
CUZ IT'S PETRIFYIN' TIME!
Wow. I must say *I'm* impressed.
"blah blah I hate lawyeres blah blah"
That's the sort of originaity we expect from a Karma HO such as Sig11.
But it's got a smiley! QUICK!!! Moderate it up to (5, Funny) before self-important Karma boy wets his pants of the karma he's not gaining in his 'experiment' to show how stupid everyone but him is.
Why doesn't he follow Jon Katz's advice and please die?
Universities need money. I like people to be educated and fees dont cover the running costs or improvements. Also governements should be allowed to make revenue, especially if its ploughed back into the country via hospitals , more police,more funding for universities, cleaner towns etc etc. Everyone already makes revenue for the governement in the form of taxes. Plus any goverment owned utilities such as rail (though it was privatised now and is worse). Why can't they be a little proactive?
What's wrong with a State turning-in profits? At least, that's that much taxes that the people won't have to pay.
Is there an unwritten rule that all things profitable must NOT belong to the State????
Sorry, I forgot; anglo-saxons have that collective neurosis about things that come from the State being automatically evil...
Can somebody give any good reason in defense of the patent system?
Let's talk about typical excuses for keeping the patent.
Excuse (1) : It rewards the innovators and thus encourages innovation.
Answer:
Scientific discoveries have been done and will be done without any
patent system. Patenting slows down freedom of utilzing the fruits
those discoveries.
Innovation and inventions like TCP/IP, WWW, HTML, XML would have been
far less successful they were patented. Internet as we know today
would not have existed and there would have been BBSes operated by AOL
and Microsoft.
So, the patent system serves the purpose of creating new monopolies or
entrenching the current ones. Patents just raise barriers to entry for
new smaller innovative players to the market. That's why established
big market players love the patent system and they patent everything
that comes to mind. Patents are used as tools to reduce competition
and thus hinders innovation.
Excuse (2) : The inventors need to eat too and recoup the cost.
Answer:
Then let the inventor keep his/her technology a trade secret. If that
technology is really that non-obvious, then he would get a significant
headstart in the market before the competitors can reverse-engineer it
or come up with their own competitive invention. Keep/make
reverse-engineering legal but keep stealing trade-secret illegal.
So, *that's* and answer about if we'd have human cloning, etc. - just patent it and nobody will come close to it for 20 years. Ancient ethics' problems solved with ancient legal system - isn't it ironic?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Another question rises - there are mentioned governmental agenices. Those are usually funded with state's (i.e., people's) money, not? And then they go and patent the thing which was the product of their research, and take all the money to itselves? Am I misunderstanding something or this is somehow strange?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
This is a genuinely innovative, non-obvious process, AFAICT, which means I think it's fair for them to patent it. But, if a mad scientist were to use the process to clone themselves, which one would they sue?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Biotech companies fall in and out of existence with incredible rapidity these days. Imagine the potential wealth that could be had if a particular biotech company was able to patent the process of growing a living and breathing Wooly Mammoth, an event that has a real potential of happening.
And how long before somebody figures out that kids would simply love a picacho(sp?) that was a real living and breathing animal. Biotech has the capacity to give us wonderful medical advancements, but I think it's a dangerous tool to be put in the hands of the impulse driven public.
It was funny when the Flinstones used animals as tools ... I wonder if it will still be humorous when we start to.
RFC2119
Okay, that's cool, but you still need to license the use of air with the plant kingdom. I've found that air is an invaluable resource and since they have exclusive control over it, you're going to either need to start cloning oak trees or pay them large sums of carbon dioxide for the privelege. Keep in mind that cutting them down (perhaps as a form of legal revenge?) doesn't go over well - your air supply may be cut off a few years later.. and, well.. we all know what that does to your long-term survival options.
Keep in mind, kids, that hatching lawyers isn't covered by this patent. You can still grow them, feed them with red tape, and finally put them into your fish tank and watch them duel for the all important "injunction". That goodness for that - I'd be real bummed if I couldn't grow my own lawyers. =)
Although I'm not a big fan of patents in general, I have to say that this one seems reasonable. It certainly meets the criterea of novelty and usefulness that seem to be lacking in so many software patents.
It could be argued that it is the construction of a particular type of machine - a biological machine. Just because the parts are made of cells doesn't mean that this is no less a mechanism.
It could be argued in Philosophy 101, but not in a patent infringrement lawsuit. The patent is on a process, not a physical construction.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Actually, this doesn't set a precedent - it follows one. That is to say: procedures are patented all the time. In biotech this is normal. It's normal in other areas as well. I think it's reasonable too, because many times the method IS the science.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
This is business as usual for science. Methods and procedures are patented all the time. This is reasonable because many times, the procedure IS the science. Sometimes the real achievement isn't the product (after all, we already had sheep) it's the way you made the product. This is very true in biotechnology; alot of the research going on is simply to find methods that actually work. What we'll eventually do with all those biotech methods isn't even known yet.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
I hope no one comes along today and starts complaining about patents in this thread. Yes, some patents appear to be bogus (one-click shopping springs to mind) but this is a well deserved patent, in my eyes. After all, if cloning were a simple feat that didn't require years of research and millions of dollars in funding, then we'd have seen cloned sheep years ago, and cloned dinosaurs would be much closer to reality than they are today (which is pretty distant).
Isn't there some sort of unwritten rule that says academic and government institutions work for the benefit of the scientific community, not in an attempt to gather revenue?
Tell that to all the Ivy League schools in the US. Alot of them have been applying for patents which deal with discoveries they've had in their academic research. The result is that the school gets all royalties... kind of a scarey though actually, that universities have the potential to become an economic power instead of just an academic power.
I interpret this as: we will license the technology to other companies so other companies can develop or enhance this tecnhology but our patent will hopefully prevent ethical arguments from blowing out of proportion.
Last night The Irish Times hosted a lecture by Ian Wilmut (excellent talk, btw), and during the q&a he was asked about patenting. His reply was that the UK government was cutting back on research, and that the Roslin Institute needed the money. On the back of the patent, they were able to get investment and increase spending; pre-investment they were spending GBP400,000 a year, and they're able to spend ten times as much now.
He also pointed out that the Institute doesn't qualify for Wellcome Trust grants, leaving patents as the most obvious method for paying the bills and increasing their research budget.
It's not a bad patent, but it depends on intent. The intent here seems to be to protect themselves while telling everyone else how to do it too.
:-)
:-)
However, I don't like patents in general. So therefore, I am going to patent the splicing of genes from two homo-sapiens, to create a third homo-sapien with characteristics from the first two.
(I'll let the crowd figure that one out.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Definitely innovative and non-obvious, until this was done there was repeated insistence that animal, unlike plant, cells would never be able to be used for cloning as they were not totipotent.
W.r.t. the mad scientist, well - mad scientists are good for driving technology and thus the best thing to do is to clone the mad scientist thousands of times. Thus, even for heinous crimes the guilt is distributed over many bodies and the individual punishment is thus negligible as the moral quota tends to 1/infinity.
After all, this is not a machine or mechanism
It could be argued that it is the construction of a particular type of machine - a biological machine. Just because the parts are made of cells doesn't mean that this is no less a mechanism. They've shown a way to take bits of things found in nature and use them to create other things. Would we argue against nano-tech because it used atoms? - merely a process that puts molecules together in different ways?
What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
Restricting access to things that are necessary for life and health go on all the time under our current system. Hence the high price of drugs for the third world etc. It's capitalism.
Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI is pretty committed and there are links available through
Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI is pretty committed and there are links available through the Scientific Applications on Linux site. Perhaps it's such a large area that it would be a good thing to have an independent /.-like site that provided forums for these discussions - taking sci.molbio etc to a nicer medium, it could allow for sharing of graphics which would help some awkward discussions.
yeah the only problem with it is why should
anybody anywhere else to something stupid like
this ?
While this certainly seems to be a reasonable application of patent law, rewarding a genuinely impressive advancement of the state of the art, I wonder what kind of precedent this sets.
After all, this is not a machine or mechanism, but a procedure developed in the course of scientific research.
To what degree will this inhibit research into improvements on the method?
What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
Geron? Genom? Sounds suspicious to me!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
This should be easy enough to get around. Just name your sheep something other than "Dolly".
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Surely you can't patent cloning, because there is always prior art! :)
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
It depends on the definition of "entire human"! If I make a clone of myself that is complete except for some specific traits I don't want to keep anyway (for example, the whole aging thing) would I still be complying with the patent agreement.
Human Cloning is a moral and ethical argument, it should NOT be left up to lawyers to work out! Anytime we let the law dictate our moral code we tend to get ourselves in trouble (for example, prohibition, abortion, euthanasia, etc.)
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Just some quick background ...
...
I work at Infigen in Wisconsin, USA. We were the first lab to clone a cow using nuclear transfer. We have several issued and pending patents on the nuclear transfer process. We also have the largest herd of cloned cattle in the world
The patent situation for cloning is as messy as with computer technology. The claims being allowed are extremely broad, and we all use the same technique for the most part. There are minor variations in growth media, activation protocols, etc.; and we all seem to be awarded patents based on those variations.
The approach to writing patents for cloning is the same as in other areas of biotech - make your claims as broad as possible and let the lawyers sort it out. I expect things to get nasty here in the near future
.sig
I agree with you, except it can be unreasonable to expect this to work. I mean, I won't say much about government, but academic institutions can really use that revenue. Tuition costs only make up for a small percent of a university's income (speaking for Canadian Universities...). The rest comes from other sources, such as government funding (which is becoming less) and from spinoff businesses from university research and development.
If the university didn't try to turn up a profit, the university could not exist. Tuition from students is not nearly enough to cover the costs of operation.
I'd hardly lump Linux into the same group with major scientific accomplishment! Cloning *nix is completely different than cloning sheep. One is a massive and repeatable chunk of code finished in a few years; the other is a ethically-charged medical proceedure relying in hundreds of years of research.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Is every scientific break through from now on going to be patented like this? Luckily in the case of Linux the GPL has prevented things of this nature. We'll just have to see...
along with two government agencies that helped fund the research
The method is being patented so that those who funded the research can use it as a source of revenue. The UK Government is funded by the people of the United Kingdom (obviously).
They should use the patent for what benefits the people the most: release it to the scientific community in general (for any use). The UK Government is not a business. It should not be trying to turn a profit.
Isn't there some sort of unwritten rule that says academic and government institutions work for the benefit of the scientific community, not in an attempt to gather revenue? Apparently not, or it's being ignored. Oh well.
-V
Hosting for Creators: http://rpg-works.net
Researchers patent the scientific method!
Hosting for Creators: http://rpg-works.net
I gather this patent allows them to corner the world market for CLONED SHEEP, which could potentially run into the BILLIONS of dollars over the next decade.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
WASHINGTON -- In a move which surprised relatively few people, scientists have patented the cloning technique known as "embryo splitting". This technique involves forcing an embryo to split in two in the early stages of development.
It was pointed out that prior art existed, in the form of twins born naturally. Geoff Carpenter, the patent lawyer who represented the scientists, commented "Just because a technique which is exactly the same in almost every respect already exists does not mean that it is prior art." The lawyer went on to add "Besides, it's not likely that God will sue us. He's much too busy with the gene patenting crowd at the moment."
More as it develops.
[Disclaimer: The above was a work of fiction, a bit of humor. Please don't interpret it as flamebait -- the actual patent discussed in this topic seems to be pretty valid, as nothing like it exists or has existed.]
-Denor
"The human body is riddled with what, if it was engineered rather than evolved, could only be called kludge." The human body may contain "kludge", but we can not even attempt to design many of the bodies elaborate systems. While recent advances have made it possible for the blind to have partial vision, look at the techniques used. The equipment is cumbersome and not nearly as effective as the human body. The most powerful computers cannot begin to model the folding of proteins that naturally occurs. The bottom line is that nature is excellent at finding optimum solutions to the point current technology only begins to rival nature.
First, he was "sitting on the back of the giants" - there was huge research in this field going for years. He didn't start with nothing: he definitely was the first one to get to the point of having a clone of a mammal not derived from embryo cells, but there are still some important issues. I wonder whether this patent is going to stop the scientific community from doing further research.
This patent is much more disturbing then the one from Amazon (after all, one click, two clicks, who cares, how much time you spend on reading the book you've bought with this marvellous technology?). It will hamper some of the most important research fields in modern medicine, like getting finally xenotransplants work.
If everyone patented every scientific discovery the way Wilmut did you wouldn't be reading slashdot now. And Wilmut wouldn't have had even the chance of starting his research. On the other hand - yes, I agree, the team at Roslin Institute is responsible for the breakthrough - namely, choosing the right cell cycle stage for nuclear transfer. Remember, he did not invent the nuclear transfer, which has been conducted for the first time in 1952.
Regards,
January
P.S. Two links for you:
The Cloning of Dolly, a nice and easy explanation what is this nuclear transfer all about and how cloning works, and
A brief history of nuclear transfer, a nice essay at the Roslin Institute.
Unfortunately, those of you who have no access to "Nature" cannot read the full article, but I put some exerts here. Actually, it was my today's slashdot submission (rejected, of course - I have never seen anything posted to slashdot referring to any good biological site). I thought the article is interesting, because it targets the whole scientific community (there is hardly a biologist out there not reading "Nature"), and is the first article in such a journal which mentions Linus Torvalds and Linux, therefore making these names known to a large number of scientists who never heard them before. In a certain way, it could bring Linux more publicity then an editorial in "Times".
Regards,
January
Think of all the money you could get from licensing!
Amazon.com has proved that you can patent ANYTHING.
Hmm.. has anybody pantented a patent yet? I might.. should earn me some spare cash.
-- when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
The process being patented is not really that useful. Using it, you can clone a mammal every 100 to 500 tries, depending on your skill. Each attempt takes at least a couple of days before the cell can be implanted into the host mother's uterus. Then you have to wait a few days to see if the mammal is pregnant. It is not efficient enough to be practical.
UK patents can be renewed every five years for up to 25 years. However, in the US patents expire after 20 years, correct? So will this patent be protected internationally for the 25 years it is legal in the UK, or the 20 years that a patent applied for in the US lasts?
I guess that this means that the sheep farmers can sell the original and keep the clone for their own perverted devices. I dunno i'm tired and drunk.
These researchers have a formula to produce clones. They are only trying let everyone know exactly how their process works, while protecting their lifes work.
This is exactly what the patent process is supposed to do. Otherwise these researchers would keep their work secret and that would hold back other peoples work. People would have to reinvent the wheel everytime they wanted to do any research at all.
They are not abusing the patent process by trying to patent life or something obvious to anyone. They aren't broadly trying to patent the whole idea of cloning, only one method of doing so.
This is a _good_ thing.
-- Never make a general statement.
I mean, it's only a patent on one specific technique, as near as I can tell.
Impact to me? Umm....none that I can see, at least at this time.
On another note...
Gene therapy scares me. I still don't think we understand what we are really messing with. I'm not worried about any kind of moralistic issues regarding gene therapy and cloning, just the scientific ones. Nature has been at this for a long long time, and I suspect that it's figured out the best methods for handling the improvement of genes.
Just my opinion, mind you.
Sakhmet
"When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95."
Ban the Nukes! Save the Whales! Screw it. Nuke the Whales!
I'm torn. We can map the genome, but can we ever really understand it? We can throw more instructions-per-second at it, and we can look at it from every angle, but will we ever understand the complex interaction of one segment of DNA with another?
No, I don't think a billion sperm to ferilize one egg is efficient, but it does ensure survival of the fittest (sperm, in any case).
Sakhmet
"When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95."
Ban the Nukes! Save the Whales! Screw it. Nuke the Whales!
Nature has been at this for a long long time, and I suspect that it's figured out the best methods for handling the improvement of genes.
Nature isn't all that efficient/good at finding optimal solutions, actually. The human body is riddled with what, if it was engineered rather than evolved, could only be called kludge. (Check out the way our eyes and gonads work, for example)
Evolution is a process of cumulative nudges (and sometimes giant leaps), and we all know what you wind up with when you just pour new work on top of old: legacy systems, in this case legacy genes. How much genetic garbage is in our DNA?
I agree that we don't yet know the full ramifications (hell, we don't even have the full genome mapped *yet*) of tinkering with parts of our genetic code, but I don't agree that "natural design" is at all efficient.
Anyone else think billions of sperm to fertilize *one* egg is innefficient?