U.S. Denies Patent on Part-Human Hybrid

jimkski wrote to mention a Boston Globe story involving the refusal of a patent claim on a genetically engineered creature. From the article: "A New York scientist's seven-year effort to win a patent on a laboratory-conceived creature that is part human and part animal ended in failure Friday, closing a historic and somewhat ghoulish chapter in U.S. intellectual property law."

Comments

Re:so you can genetically engineer corn, and pigs

[D iz a n k Meister]

That's not true. You can genetically engineer all the people you like, you just can't hold US patents on any of them.

Not the end of the story

[Raul654]

The exact same thing happened in 1980 when someone tried to patent an artificial bacteria. The USPTO rejected the claim, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, where In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court explained that while natural laws, physical phenomena, abstract ideas, or newly discovered minerals are not patentable, a live artificially-engineered microorganism is. So I suspect this is nowhere near over. As a matter of fact, (IANAL), I think the ideas set forth in that case would seem to be on Mr. Newman's side. If the court rules against him, they're going to have to come up with some kind of legal dividing line to explain why artificial bacteria are patentable but artificial humans/humanoids aren't.

This won't affect other stupid patents.

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA (emphasis added):

When US scientist Ananda Chakrabarty applied for the first patent on a living organism, a genetically engineered bacterium able to digest oil spills, the case ended up in the Supreme Court because the patent office did not want to patent life forms. Rifkin had filed the main amicus brief supporting the patent office.

They lost. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court declared that patents could be issued on "anything under the sun that is made by man."

The office has obliged, issuing patents on bacteria, yeast, and as of last fall, 436 animals.

In 1987, the patent office announced it would draw the line at humans, but it offered no legal rationale or statutory backing.

They didn't deny this patent because it's stupid; they denied it because it's a patent on a human being. So, no, this doesn't set any sort of precedent. Sorry.

Re:Frightening

[GoofyBoy]

Woops. Make that the 13th Constitutional Amendment.

Re:Too Late...

[philge]

Have you been sneased on,been bitten or handled the fecal material waste of these cultures, all these things happen (with live mice). These cultures are usually kept in conditions designed to minimise the passage of infections so I'm not sure it is afair comparison. It would be interesting to find out if any viruses have crossed the species barrier in the cultures.

Encoding oddity

[Jay Carlson]

Oh, I love it when big web sites screw up their characters trying to be clever.

In the second page we see the "word":

déjÃ

Off to view source. It shows:

For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu

Oops. They meant déjà, and just had to get the snotty accents right. Unfortunately, they fed their UTF-8 text into a web publishing tool that assumed it was ISO Latin 1 or no doubt Win1252. Oops.

The sequence "0xC3 0xA9" is "é" when interpreted as UTF-8, but you can't escape it like that in HTML. Either put those actual UTF-8 octets into your source and declare the charset when serving it, or put in an HTML character reference to the decoded Unicode codepoint.

What they should have written was:

For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu

giving

For Rifkin, the case was déjà vu

Re:Wow - you had me at "US denies patent".

[budgenator]

there are about 40k genes in humans
I'm not sure that anyone really has any idea how many are truely human genes, how many are advanced primate genes, how many are shared by primates in general. I once remember a study that suggested that humans and gorillas were 98% the same geneticaly. That was before genomics, I still assume we'd find the results of a modern genomic comparisson embarrassing to our human ego's.

Re:Frightening

[cpt kangarooski]

Will we create Frenkenstein?

It's spelled 'Frankenstein.' It's pronounced 'Fronk-en-steen.'

And Frankenstein was the doctor who created the creature, not the creature himself.

Re:I'd be happy about this

[Anonymous Coward]

But aren't a huge number of the alleles in the human genome patented already? It seems like this was done not because of a reasonable understanding on the part of the patent office that living creatures shouldn't be patentable, but purely because of the grossout factor. That's not a step forward.

Alleles are not living entitites - they are different versions of a gene.

As to your second point, the USPTO did oppose the patenting of life forms (of any type). That is why the Chakrabarty case (mentioned in TFA) went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, in not so many words, that life forms are patentable using the standard of patent eligible subject matter of "anything under the Sun made by man." After that decision, the USPTO took, and still takes the position on Constitutional grounds, that humans are not patentable. There a huge number of Biotech patents where the claims contain the restriction "a non-human mammal ..." for precisely this reason.

Re:Wow - you had me at "US denies patent".

[Omniscientist]

Genetically, the primate closest to the human being is the chimpanzee, as the genetic difference between man and chimpanzee is only 1.4%.

between man and chimpanzee is only 1.4%

[xtermin8]

That figure is out of context. There is a 1.4% difference in DNA. Genes are an abstraction of inheritable traits. Without knowing specifically which combinations of of DNA sequences produce specific inheritable traits, there is no way to calculate percentages.

Re:Kosher pork

[mattdm]

Deuteronomy 23:13 And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee ...

I've been in a lot of churches of all faiths, but have never seen one yet without an indoor privy.

Cute, but it only applies to church camps -- look at verse 23:9, which leads into that passage. (Note yours begins with "and".)

(Not that there aren't plenty of wacky commandments in there.)

Re:Wow - you had me at "US denies patent".

[Taladar]

AFAIK the Bonobo is even closer than the chimpanzee.