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. "

Comments

This one seeme reasonable

[SimonK]

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.

Well deserved.

[um... Lucas]

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).

Re:Government Money was used for this

[rde]

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.

Dangerous ground.

[TheDullBlade]

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."

Tomorrow's News

[Valur]

Researchers patent the scientific method!

We'll call them when we need more sheep

[Greyfox]

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.

Well deserved?? So WHAT? I don't like it anyway.

[jw3]

Although I don't think that the cloning patent is as ridiculous as one of those from amazon-click-once-dpt., I am quite sure that you don't have the full picture here, basically due to huge media coverage Wilmut got with his Dolly.

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.

Open source, patents and scientific community

[jw3]

There is an article in today's Nature issue entitled "In praise of open software". It states, among other things, that "[bioinformatic] Tools [for genomics] that add value to genome data are to be welcomed, but as the licensing strategy being adopted by Celera Genomics becomes clear (see page 231), it gives new grounds for wariness." I know this is slightly off-topic, I just want to stress that the growing number of patents / license in my field of science is a matter of concern for many biologists, as it is clear from this article in the leading scientific journal.

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

I think that this is a good patent

[buckrogers]

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.