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Cancer Mouse Not Patentable in Canada
Proaxiom writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting the Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that OncoMouse, the so-called 'Harvard Mouse' that is especially prone to cancer, cannot be patented under Canadian law. The hapless rodent still enjoys patent protection in the U.S., Japan and much of Europe. So there is at least one place where higher life forms cannot be patented, but I am not familiar enough with the intricacies of international intellectual property treaties to figure out the consequences of the discrepancy. I'm sure countless IANAL's will be willing to offer opinions."
I am not a lawyer, (nor do I play one on TV), but I am a Canadian. Perhaps our attitude towards such things as health care may explain this mouse ruling. Americans tend to mock our system as left-wing and socialist, but given a choice between being sick (or being a patentable mouse) in Canada or the U.S., my choice is clear.
Warning: The contents of this post are non-flamable.
No, actually it means the opposite, unless someone sues someone else... like always.
If the mice are not patentable in Canada, then anyone can genetically produce them, or however they feel like it. This would lead to lower costs of cancer prone mice... so Canada could have many exported to the U.S.... If they don't die of cancer first.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I know this is slashdot and we're all a bunch of godless heathens, etc, but come on.
This is just disrespectful and ignorant. First, God doesn't own intellectual property. There are certainly ethical problems with the IP of any living being, but it is not because God had the idea first. Second, God is NOT the lazy man's anything. He is not the explanation of things we don't understand. Admittedly, it is impossible to wholly (homophonic pun) know or understand God, but he is made known to many through providence. Faith is not laziness, and God and Science are not mutually exclusive.
Sorry for the diatribe, but it is only hapless clarification.
Yes it was. Whether he was aware of the way in which his plants had been changed is irrelevant. He didn't ASK to have them changed. It happened through the actions of other forces not under his control (his neighbors, the wind, and Monsanto. The plants in question were HIS OWN. Monsanto ended up vandalizing his crop, so to speak.
If I steal a can of spray paint and use it to spray grafitti on your house, you shouldn't be obligated to pay the store for the paint should you choose to keep the grafitti in place.
"10x less population" would only make mathematical sense if it was possible for Canada to have a negative population. (With Canada having negative 9x as many people as the US.) I'm not even sure what a negative population would mean (people made of antimatter?) I think you meant "One tenth the population", which isn't the same thing.
And the population density has nothing to do with why Canada's legal system has more grey areas. Canada's legal system is more grey because it is more directly derived from the British system, which is more grey than the US system. And Britain most certainly isn't less densely populated than the US.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It makes me really uncomfortable that companies are applying for and the Federal Government is issuing patents for genes and all sorts of life forms.
I understand the motivation for this: companies who develop these "products" want to protect and insure a return on their investments. I think that it's OK to patent the *procedure* or *process* used to generate these things, but I don't like the precident set by corporations or individuals patenting what are essentially naturally-occuring things.
Think about it... suppose Glaxo finds a "cancer gene" which, perhaps, can be used to predict that someone with the gene will develop a particular form of cancer (I know that such things may already have been discovered). Suppose that I possess the gene. Now, if Glaxo patents this gene, they are essentially asserting intellectual property rights on part of my body, on my DNA. I really don't like even the idea of that. The ramifications and implications of this area of law, in my opinion, are still unclear and potentially frightening.
On a more general note, patent law is supposed to encourage innovation and development. However, increasingly, it's being used to enforce monopolies (look at Microsoft or Gemstar). And, in the area of health care and medicine, it often has the negative side-effect of pricing many people out of life-saving or even life-enhancing treatments and procedures.
In my humble lay-opinion, our (the US's) intellectual property laws are in dire need of some revision and rethinking, particularly in the biomedicine and information technologies realms. Patents should be issued more judiciously and circumspectly and should carry much shorter expiration dates. Once a company has earned back their development costs and made a modest profit, they should yield their technology to the public to encourage further development and growth and, particularly with respect to medical technology, to make their products accessible to people in a larger number of income and class brackets.
I'm not a socialist, and I generally don't approve of the government interfering in the private sector. On the other hand, I do believe that government should encourage personal and corporate responsibility. Biotech companies, obstensively, exist not to make billions of dollars in profits, but to save and improve lives. Intellectual Property laws can and should be used to encourage a greater balance between profit and public benefit.
So you're saying the right course of action would have been for the farmer to cull his OWN CROP of the plants that had been accidentally contaminated, and deliberately choose to only use those seeds that had not come from Monsanto-contaminated pollination? Bull. Keep in mind that the plants that produced the seed were his OWN CROP on his OWN PROPERTY that had been forced to produce the patented seed through no action of his own. So now Monsanto has the right to say any plants that YOU paid for, that YOU cared for, that are on YOUR land that just happen to get cross-pollinated by your neighbor's Monsanto crop are no longer your own plants that you can do with what you will.
If you agree that that's right, then you are agreeing that it's okay for Monsanto to steal ownership ofa portion of a farmer's crop.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
If someone in the US breeds mice, and by accident a strain happens to have similar or identical DNA sequences which give it the big C then is this a violation of patent? And what if the genes have never been sequenced, it's just known that they get cancer and are sold for research? If retrospectively we find out that they violate patents, it would see a bit stupid that the mice breeding (under only some human control and with the inbuilt unpredictability of fertilisation and DNA replication) could be illegal.
Patenting nature just seems very wrong to me. Just because I decode some of nature's best work shouldn't mean that I own it.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
Go read his website. He didn't know it was "Monsanto's seed," he never bought seed from Monsanto (preferring to breed his own for the last half-century or so, and he certainly didn't steal anything from Monsanto. In fact, he only found out about the cross-polination when he was trying to eliminate "volunteer" canola growing where he didn't want it and used Roundup.
Experts in the subject already insist that it's virtually if not utterly impossible to find canola, corn, and soybean seed without traces of (patented) genetically-modified genes in them. Monsanto, however, is the big offender, in that it ruthlessly goes after people who wind up with "their" proprietary genes in crops. It's also totally possible to find ultra-hybridized varieties of seed containing more than one company's proprietary genes. That comes from natural cross-polination, and other forms of non-crossbreeding contamination, not theft.
All of which just blatantly shows why this Supreme Court decision is a good idea, and why Mr. Schmeiser should get Monsanto to pay through the nose for wrecking his organic hybrid canola variant with their genetically modified strain. I wonder if this court case will help?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The U.S. get the critical last fourth of its oil from the Middle East, te expensive fourth that drives our policy. The other 3/4, mostly domestic, is taken for granted. We also import from Nigeria and Venezuela, getting caught up in their politics, too. Then there's the rising star of Kazakhstan. It leads to conflicts of interest, to put it mildly.
The Times published a map a week or two ago showing int'l reserves and annual production by country -- wish I could find it, they did a nice job. Iraq has 1/10 of the reserves, and Saudi Arabia far more -- all easily extracted oil. (Another DOE chart.) Kuwait has about as much as Iraq, or Iran, and so on. Here is some of the data. Canada, like the U.S., doesn't have that long a future at current extraction rates. The USGS also has a detailed int'l map of projected reserves.
The Middle East, meanwhile, has a staggering amount of oil untapped. It makes me wonder why Iraq's Hussein doesn'y just kick back and get rich, buying the affection of his people. He has the oil. There's something missing, perhaps just his sanity.
The U.S. needs some long-term planning. One of these days we should just invade an oil-rich country and make a colony or something out of it. It fact, I think such plans are in the works as we speak.
Obviously I have an opinion or two... none of this means Canada is irrelevant, it's just too peaceful for us to get all worked up about and bomb or something. Disappointed?