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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."
Does this mean that smuggling OncoMice across the border to Canadian medical researchers will become the new Hot Item on the black market?
Any relation to Danger Mouse?
the so-called 'Harvard Mouse' that is especially prone to cancer...So there is at least one place where higher life forms cannot be patented
Prone to Cancer = higher life form? You're views are ass backward, friend.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
You can wander through the legalisms, but basically I've been uncomfortable with the overlap between the doman of patent law and, well, God (and/or whatever evolutionary variant one subscribes to -- I'm on the science side of the fence, but "God" is a heck of a lot more poetic).
I wonder if this could cause U.S.-Canadian tensions? The IP people in the states are riding high these days.
So there is at least one place where higher life forms cannot be patented
Mainly because there are no higher forms of life there.
Sorry, had to say it, but I actually love Canada.
http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/rec/html/ harvard.en.html
Carousel is a lie!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is the same country in which the farmer was sued for using seeds from last year's canola crop, rather than buying them (again) from Monsanto.
but the biochemical method for manipulating the genese of the mouse to create the Harvard mouse is.
Patent law tends to be highly compartmentalized between nation-states and as such the Canadian ruling will probably have little direct effect on the patents held in other countries.
:(
The most it may do would be to keep alive the debate over whether higher life forms can actually be patented. And then, of course, there's the possibility of companies moving research in this area to Canada to avoid licensing costs.
All of that said, I feel sorry for the mouse.
Do they have to pay a royalty?
"Congratulations, it's a boy! That'll be $1.50."
Does this mean we can all move to Canada and have a bunch of sickly mouse pets to play with? Oh what joy. ;>
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
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.
Onco Mouse, Cancer Mouse, and Harvard Mouse...
I don't think Disney has a thing to worry about.
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I'm sure the IP happy 4 letter Orgs are talking with Bush right now. Watch for an invasion force to start massing on the US northern border with the intent of bringing these terrorists to justice!
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If someone has successfully patented a living organism, then the whole patent system needs to be revisited. If living organims are patentable, then every new breed of dog or cat sould be patentable, and clearly they haven't been. Why am I not patented?
I understand that some researchers spent a lot of time in creating that mouse, whether through selective breeding, gene therapy or whatever. However, what we have now is a self-replicating organism. The patent process was never intended nor should it ever be used to prevent organisms from self-replicating.
I don't know what the right solution is to encourage future developments in this field, but to say that anyone or anything owns the genetic code of an organism goes into dangerous terrority. It isn't like they created the genes, they just studied them and noted an interesting characteristic.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
Does this mean anyone in Canada will be able to make those stupid smoking mouse commercials?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
From the decision text: The word "manufacture" ("fabrication"), in the context of the Act, is commonly understood to denote a non-living mechanistic product or process, not a higher life form.
This interpretation potentially disallows all patents on future gene therapies, potentially genetically modified crops, and even down to the level of bacterial engineering for anything from drug production to oil eating bacteria to scavenge oil spills. My guess is that this myopic interpretation is going to cause lots of legal problems for many companies big and small and will eventually get reversed when they can get either a lawyer or an consultant to properly brief the court on why "manufacture" can apply to bioengineering and genetics.
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From the ruling:
:)
"Although Parliament enacted special legislation for the protection of plant breeders, it did not address other higher life forms. Moreover, the passage of the Plant Breeders' Rights Act demonstrates that mechanisms other than the Patent Act may be used to encourage inventors to undertake innovative activity in the field of biotechnology.[...] If a special legislative scheme was needed to protect plant varieties, a subset of higher life forms, a similar scheme may also be necessary to deal with the patenting of higher life forms in general. It is beyond the competence of this Court to address in a comprehensive fashion the issues associated with the patentability of higher life forms."
In other words, patents related to plants have their own set of laws. They were not meant to include animals and the Supreme Cort does not want to take the responsibility of something that Parliament should do.
At least, that is my interpretation
No comment.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is the same country in which the farmer was sued for using seeds from last year's canola crop, rather than buying them (again) from Monsanto.
These are two entirely different things... Harvard doesn't have near as much money as Monsanto!The issue was sticky enough. Then they had to push it further by trying to patent other animals with similar traits? No wonder it was denied (at least in Canada). As a result, a media-storm ensued, and I'm sure that helped to influence the courts.
Sex - Find It
This will become an issue as biotech organisms start appearing en masse (whenever that might be). Right now, there's no real incentive to produce, in Canada, nonpatented oncomice, simply because most of the countries to which you'd export (e.g., the U.S., Japan) would allow infringement suits. As the suite of gengineered organisms expands, however, expect a great deal of political and legal pressure for Canada to fall in line with the other states.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
I anal, but not with mice... gerbils are favorite, wtf is Timothy thinking?
Takes all kinds I guess.
and keep them from reproducing without my permission?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
This ruling effectively throws the issue back into the laps of the politicians, who will undoubtedly be lobbied strongly by industry. Canadians who agree with this ruling need to lobby back. I recall the existance of a number of areas where medical progress has been held back in the US due to patents on higher life forms, but do not recall the details. Can anybody pass on pointers to these cases, so they can be used as arguments against a policy change by our elected officials?
if they patented mouse cancer, could they sue for infringement.
I wonder if I can patent greed.
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
Walt Disney must be spinning in his grave!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Labmices are thought of as commodoty (sp) in the bioindustry world. There are companies that breed mices for research.
However, *I* see no arguments of patending a mice over than, say, Galloway cow. Anybody can get sperm/egg/calves and start their own breeding program, why should little white mice be any different?
J.
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Thanks, I *am* available as a consultant.
One of the key features of existing international treaties over intellectual property is the idea of "national treatment". Roughly speaking the idea is that nations have to treat non-nationals the same as nationals. For example, if Candian law grants Candian authors a copyright in their works for life + 50 years, then Candian law should grant the same sort of copyright, for the same term, to non-Candian authors. So national treatment is a pretty weak requirement - it allows nations to have any sort of intellectual property law they like, so long as that law does not discriminate between nationals and non-nationals.
As far as the national treatement requirement goes, the only constraint on Candian law in this case is that, if Canadian courts reject such patent claims made by US citizens/corportations, then they must reject similar claims made by Canadian citizens/corportations.
In addition to the national treatment requirement, treaties have also tried to establish certain standards concerning the nature and terms of intellectual property rights, but these IP standards do not get down to the details of what can or cannot be patented. In general these IP standards have been designed to avoid all the really difficult questions about intellectual property, and they tend to be weakly enforced in any case.
So, as far as these additional IP standards go, it is highly unlikely that this Candian court ruling will conflict with any of them.
However, the fact that Canadian courts have now taken up a position against this sort of patent makes it less likely that this sort of patent will ever make it into the IP standards established by *future* international treaties.
It was a patent issue.
And it's not that far fetched that they won; it wasn't an "accident". The guy KNEW it was monsanto's seed. It wasn't forced on him. He knew they had a patent on it as well. He took the gamble.
What you have to realize is that the legal system is not as convoluted in Canada. Though this time, the guy might have been found to be doing something wrong, under slightly different circumstances, monsanto would lose (say, if the guy really had no idea it had happened).
You can't just compare one ruling and declare the Canadian justice system to be as screwed up as the US. Remember, we have 10x less population, over a larger area, and a system that is *FAR* more flexible and less complex than the US system. Not everything is Black & White in the Canadian legal system, nor do we pretend it is.
You jump SOVIET RUSSIA!!!
I know Americans mocked as a bunch of greedbags, perhaps not unfairly, but a "new" mouse also costs $$$ (US or Canadian) to develop. In the classic IP paradigm, will there be money to develop new mice if money can't be made from them? The sick humans potentially lose.
Gene research is still pricy. Eventually scientists will just dial what they need into the Mouse-o-matic(TM) to get what they want -- and ironically Canada will give it a patent -- but for now, I don't know. (I said way up top that patenting animals weirds me out.)
My personal preference would be gov't funding for this sort of thing, but with great caution so we don't turn it into a big socialist mess like in... never mind. Anyway, it comes down to money one way or another.
Of course they can't patent it, there is prior art!
With thanks to Al Fago
You can't take the sky from me...
All this patent and IP stuff must have come from Egypt. I now know why we don't know how the pyramids were built. The folks that owned the companies doing the work patented and copyrighted everything. They punished anyone that spoke of it with the DMCA (Digging and Movers Copyright Act) and thus soon the technology was forgotten.
This is probably why we don't have any of the music or movies from that era as well. They were covered by the MPAA (Movies and Pyramids Acrhitects Association) and the RIAA (Ra Is An Artist).
If this stuff keeps up, it won't be too many years until everything here will be forgotten as well, due to the fact that no one can say anything, do anything, or even think about anything.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
I'm a big fan of the notion that there's a distinct if somewhat grey line between Invention and Discovery, and that only Invention should be patentable. Discovering a new species of mouse in the wild does not give one the right to patent it. Inventing a new species of mouse through genetic manipulation does, although it raises ethical questions, especially if applied to a more emotionally developed mammal like a dolphin, a dog, or a human.
11*43+456^2
The patent is rejected here in Canada. Mainly, I think, to set precedent against (and continuing with precedent of) patenting the "higher life forms", as was mentioned.
If you want, you can also look here for a local article on the topic. The methodologies etc are patentable, the life form is not (in Canada).
Really, it should be this way in the rest of the world too, patenting the methologies and general process (not the lifeform) should be quite enough to prevent against scientific pilfering.
I feel better about world problems now!
My karma for QOTD must be well in focus today, because I loaded up the Will Shatner interview and then Wil Wheaton's profile and on both of them, I got:
He's dead, Jim.
Canada is very unfriendly to some rodents, yet worships others. We have Wiarton Willie our groundhog in Ontario, the beaver as our national animal and on our nickel, Gainer the gopher [lovable SK Roughriders CFL mascot], yet in Alberta we have outlawed rats! Now we've outlawed patented mice! This tramples on rodent rights!
CBC's version of events
The mouse genome project - A success!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Whose the tumor riddled rat that isn't patentable at all?
C-A-N C-E-R M-O-U-S-E. Cancer Mouse! CancerMouse.
We treat him with drugs and hope he doesn't die, die, die.
Michael Loves Me!
FYI, in Canada:
... but you get the drift).
1) Medical procedures are not patentable. This is basically to prevent the formation of a monopoly on a life-saving procedure. (e.g., If someone invented a procedure to repair spinal cords, she couldn't patent it and charge a zillion dollars, because that would limit poor people's access to the technique.)
2) A life-saving drug (e.g., cure for cancer), if they're the only such life-saving drug available, is not patentable.
3) Some drug patents and trademarks seem to be quickly lost in Canada (while others are not). In the U.S., the trademark "Aspirin" has been lost to common use, so any generic manufacturer can claim that they make aspirin. Not so in Canada -- only Bayer can claim this trademark. In terms of patents, we have lots of generic drugs being manufactured that I don't think they can offer in generic form in the U.S. yet (e.g., generic forms of Reactine & Allegra). Not that I'm complaining -- our drugs are dirt cheap in comparison to what U.S. citizens pay (e.g., a month's supply of Claritin in the U.S. costs over $90 USD according to a recent Reuters article, but costs me only about $18 CAD -- this is due, in part of course, to the fact that it has been available over the counter here for some time
For more comparisons of patent law differences:
http://www.dww.com/articles/how_do_you.htm
-kris
Maybe Canadians just have a thing against rats.
.22s etc. to keep it that way.
The province of Alberta has a full-time Rat Patrol team who go around the provinces and kill rats. Alberta is rat free, and these guys drive around the borders with poison,
Some days I think this would be the perfect job.
Could Canada possibly be adopting Britan's pragmatic approach to biotechnology, with an "open source" twist?
Canada could become a hotbed of bio research if they didn't honor the patents of any bioengineered products worldwide. I hope they do this.
Genes, just like information, wants to be free.
Or can we define it as "having the capability to scream"?
Actually, I read the same thing and was about to comment, but checked and found this here first. Canada is not a f**ing state buddies, it's a country. We have our own government, and our own laws. Granted, we often bend-over and take it when the US puts pressure on our government or legal system...
Get with it guys, there's no reason to patent these little mousies themselves, so long as the process is upheld (which we did do). Canada *does* tend to have a system of thought, law and morality that very much differs from the US (see laws: gun control, copyright, lawsuits), so we are perfectly within our rights to uphold these values in our laws.
Er, excuse me, have to get the door
Hello, who the heck are you??
What? FBI? Patriot act? Expression of terrorist thought? Guys, this is Canada!
No, it's not a state, we have our own government and laws.
What? Bought out... political pressuring? Damn... Ok, I'll come peacefully
Screw the OncoMouse. How many people are going to buy one? Science geeks and Poindexters is all. I told DuPont (when they had the rights to it) that the big bucks would be in OncoHamster, OncoRabbit, OncoKitty, and OncoPuppy. Every parent would buy a small mammal for the kids if they were guaranteed that in six months - once the kid stopped feeding it and playing with it and was generally bored with the whole ownership thing, the animal would go off to the big pet shop in the sky.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
For fucks sake calm down.
State is a legitimate english term for a sovereign nation. Although in North American it is generally a reference to a US state as opposed to its actual meaning.
Especially after calling George W a moron
So it's OK for an American (Bill Mahr) to call him a moron, but not OK for someone else?
The problem is that he IS a moron.
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.
Nah, just build a worse mouse.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
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.
In general the scientific community frowns on terms like "higher life forms." "Lower vertibrates" are now "non-mammalian vertibrates", "lower primates" are now "non-human primates."
And no, this is not some screwed up politically correct thing; the view is that the old terms (like "lower" and "higher") are not scientificaly acurate. There is no evidence that a frog is any more or less complex than a mouse. In fact, there are unicellular organisms with larger genomes than ours (human's).
The current theory is that all organisms evolved from a single ancestor -- thus all species have been evolving for the same ammount of time so none can be any more or less evolved than any other.
They clearly have no respect for IP law and the freedom to make money. Next thing you know, they'll start advising people to not come to the US to avoid our "draconian" security measures. And heck, while they're at it, maybe they'll nationalize their health care system and raise taxes and rip a huge amount of profit potential out of the economy. I blame Canada. Who's with me?
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How about this?
Don't know if it was granted; I wasn't able to find any updates from Googling. Note that story dates from 2000.
The problem is when people can patent whole classes of organisms. Patenting any mouse prone to cancer would be a problem; in some cases, patents like that have gone through already.
Equally problematic is the patenting of genes, in particular without specific applications in mind. There are two levels of problems there. First, it means patenting a simple observation--something that required no creativity on the part of the discoverer. Second, many of the applications of genetic sequences that are covered by such patents are obvious: if you identify a mutation that causes some disease, creating a test for that is usually routine using existing techniques.
Well, you seem to have all the answers. what more can I say?
the court thinks he was lying about that.. that's the whole point here.
The court didn't rule against him on some technicality, simply because monsantos genetic material was in his crop...
they ruled against him because they believe he went out of his way to deliberately gain the benefits of their stuff, and then lied in court about it.
Whether he did or not, I have no idea, and I'm making no judgement. If he is indeed not guilty of this, I hope his countersuit goes well and monsanto pays up bigtime.
But the court ruled on the specific facts in this case... it's not some precedent that says monsanto owns those genes no matter what.
Hey, I patented my kids (pending).
I don't know the work that went into this ill-fated mouse, but we do need a way to assure ROI. I think the Canadians agree -- just not using patent for the task. The test for patentability is quite so extreme as "new life form" anyway. It will be a while before we can invent new things genetically, but there's lots of interesting work in mix-and-match of what we've got, plus the occasional induced mutation. (Obviously I'm not taking an animal rights perspective at the moment.)
There certainly are trademarked strains of mice and rats, and I assume you have some contractual obligation not to start breeding them.
Some of us well versed in "mathematical sense" know that multiplication and division are inverse relations on the natural numbers. Given a quantity y and downward scaling fact z you can calculate "z times less than y" by dividing y by z.
Oh wait, were you just being a pedantic troll? I'm sorry to mistake you as a dumbass.
What exactly does Harvard hold the patent on? The genetic structure of the onco-mouse, or the process of making one?
If it's only the process, couldn't we just get a bunch of mice and make them smoke cigarettes for years until they have cancer....and then sell them?
-ted
From the website, which you obviously haven't read: "In his defense, Schmeiser showed his own farm-based evidence that the fields ranged from nearly zero to 68% Roundup Ready. These tests were confirmed by independent tests performed by research scientists at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, MB." That's not "98%," not even close, and an uneven distribution like that certainly could be the result of contamination or drift. And there are lots of articles out there referring to the problems with contaminated seed.
The thing is not so much that the court chose to believe that Schmeiser was lying (see here to find out exactly what he was convicted of and what he wasn't); they believed Monsanto over him, for some cases, which is hardly an unexpected outcome. In any case, he wasn't convicted of "brownbagging," he was convicted of having Monsanto's genes on his land and not telling them about it and paying up for it. The former is explainable because he didn't know; the latter is just rank blackmail.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.