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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."
That's not true. You can genetically engineer all the people you like, you just can't hold US patents on any of them.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.