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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."
Even better, he bascially applied for it, hoping to set a precendent to stop others patenting living creatures.
Nice to see - my faith in the Patent system has raised slightly from 'completely hopeless' to 'mostly hopeless'
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
I'm not looking for a troll here, i'm just smoking some genetically engineered marijuana and it seems like an odd thought.
.. if he'd hired Disneys lawyers.
You guessed it, Rush Limbaugh
Humans are a subset of animals. Get it? It looks the article actually recognizes this, which is refreshing but rare. It's hard to even have a talk about important issues such as consciousness and genetics when we can't get even get passed a basic fact.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
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.
Could the USPTO finally be gaining a bit of common sense? Nah, this is more likely because of the republican administration and the likely implication of granting this patent.
bash: rtfm: command not found
In other words, he didn't own a multi-billion dollar corporation that could pay off the right people.
A patent application was denied! Wow! That is news!
If they let Amazon patent one click buying, why not let someone patent this? It's in so many ways more deserving... I mean... patent one click? Who is going to patent double click and triple clicks?
While there may be issues of precedence in the US legal system, does precedence hold importance in the USPTO, particularly with regard to an "inaction" of not granting a patent?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
There goes my retirement plan!!
I was going to have some kids, patent them... then collect royalties off them when they have kids...
That way I could retire with relative ease.
Can't wait to get started on my perfect pet!
the probability of virus/pathogen crossing the species barrier is increased enormously by makeing these things. It is madness and should be internationally outlawed.
"...Now that he has been rebuffed by his community the scientist will turn his discovery towards evil - and unleash his unholy creation on the public to seek revenge!..."
I can see the SciFi channel picking up the phone to get the rights right now.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I was planning on creating an army of giant half human, half goat warriors that would obey my every command. I would use them in an elaborate plot to rob a bank and hold the UN hostage. Then again, maybe the plan is worth going ahead with even if I cant patent it.
Still, as long as it isnt part human, your chances of prevailing in the patent office seem pretty good. Which means the giant radioactive bees are definitely good to go.
Aside from the fact that this would-be patent dealt with chimeric technologies, this case was a particularly interesting one because the filer, Stuart Newman, sought the patent to block others from creating the technology. By denying him the patent on said terms (that it is too close to a human), he won -- sort of. This means that other companies cannot patent such processes if they "discover" them, but at the same time he cannot block the creation of "chimaera", which was his original purpose.
At the time he filed the patent, the head of the USPTO held a press conference and stated that he would be denying the patent on ethical terms, ground on which the USPTO is not supposed to tread. In actuality, I've heard that he was under pressure from industry, specifically two companies in the business of chimeric technologies (I can't remember their names, but one is located in MA, I believe). In any case, the fact that he was denied a patent is good -- other people/companies cannot patent similar creations. On the other hand, his loss is bad -- other people/companies can feel free to create chimaeras.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
creature that is part human and part animal
wow, talk about prior art.....
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
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
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.
If a corporation attempts to patent much the same thing, it will be granted.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Now I can't sue Bill Gates for violating that patent by living.
Go figure that the first truely patentable concept to come up, in the news, in a long time has been deined by the US patent office. Mind you a general patent on the idea of creating geneticaly cross breed creatures may be a bit broad for a patent, but hopefully this does not stop specific creations from being pantented.
Patents should be about things that can actually be done at the time they are patented. So the first person who creates Dog-Man should be able to patent Dog-Man.
On the other hand, if this means the patent office is actually reviewing patents, and rejecting overly broad patents based on concepts mostly fictitious I'm all for it.
You're saying IP lawyers are part human? Shirley some mistake... ;-)
The scientist should now go Patent the Idea of having something not patented.
Does dog-man get royalties, or does the guy who patented dog-man?
And if they make a dog-man and a dog-woman, could the patent owner sue if they breed?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Woops. Make that the 13th Constitutional Amendment.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Can't wait to get started on my perfect pet!
:o
what are her measurements going to be?
Hey! Was it a Manimal?
And here I was thinking patents couldn't be denied. Wonder how long until they try this "deny" thing with the software patents...
---- Don't lick something unless you really mean it.
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.
This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the world would just use English.
Be careful what you wish for.
Wait, this is slashdot, where I wish the editors would just use English.
....can be seen here:
1 /i mages/michael_jackson.jpg
http://www.histar.com/mornings/starchive/2002/1
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.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As an IP lawyer myself, I'd like to confirm that we are indeed a race of half-man half-shark atomic monsters. Cower before us.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
According to well established history, the first application of this will be the porn industry. So it seems to me that the line between human-human sex and human-animal sex is likely to become quite blurred very soon.
I don't know how to ask this without sounding condescending, so here goes without any tact:
From the article: In 1987, the patent office announced it would draw the line at humans, but it offered no legal rationale or statutory backing.
So you see, this position is 18 years old. Also, it is basic knowledge of the patent system (but also implied by the article) that the USPTO doesn't possess ultimate authority to interpret law - that is the role of the judicial system.
Alternatively, this "activist" didn't even bother to pursue the appeal process, thereby keeping his application OUT of the court system, thereby preventing his "activism" from generating new case law, thereby stopping his heroism short of actually achieving anything but publicity. The USPTO rejected his application based on a stance it took in 1987 - there was no legal basis for the USPTO's stance in 1987 and because this "activist" failed to appeal, there is STILL no legal basis for the USPTO's stance. There is -literally- nothing new in this story. Well, nothing newer than 18 years ago.
So, I don't want to sound condescending, but there it is. You say, "This cannot be lauded as a 'step in the right direction' for the USPO" [sic], but I can't see how this story has anything newsworthy in it at all. If anything, this is a 'step in the right direction' for the public, for they might become slightly more aware how the Courts are actually in charge of what is or is not patentable, not the USPTO.
Here's to hoping. Keyword from the article: Chakrabarty.
Fat lot of fucking good this decision did.
It seems that one Dr. Moreau had prior art. Maybe that's why USPTO refused it.
-- Alastair
Anyone remember that movie? They tried to give Apes human-like abilities by introducing human DNA into them. The Apes, therefore, were ape-human hybirds.
Now that the patent is denied, nobody will have any reason to make an Ape-Human hybrid that will ultimately take over planets and such in the future.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I asked a rabbi about that once. I was working for a catering company in Cleveland that does a lot of Jewish events (weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on), and the catering company worked with a rabbi who oversaw things to make sure we followed the food laws. So I thought he'd be well qualified to tell me whether a pig-based animal, genetically modified to comply with the Levitical food laws, could be kosher.
I didn't get an answer, though. I couldn't get him to take the question seriously - he seemed to think that no one would go to the trouble of genetically engineering pigs, just to let Jews eat real bacon - which seems oddly naive, given the lengths people have gone to to get around the commandment against working on the Sabbath.
There are lots of questions like this, where advances in science have possibilities that aren't clearly covered under millenia-old religious laws - like how a Muslim on the moon (or worse, a rotating space station) would figure out which way to face to pray.
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.
For "conquering the planet" and "taming the forces of nature" I'd say the ants have far surpassed us. For sheer biomass and diversity, check out the info on beatles. We definitely have it all over the other primates, though. Humans rock!
Do we have a right to play God?
We're not playing god. We're playing "code monkey". The language just happens to be DNA and we're reverse engineering a set of programs doen by a vastly supurior coder... sorta like a VB programmer trying to understand and modify the vi source code.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the article: "At what point is something too human to patent?"
Interesting question, but not easy to answer. A related question would be: at what point does a collection of cells become a human being and legal citizen with rights, etc. I think if we could answer that to everyone's satisfaction (or most everyone), then the author's question would also be satisfied. What does it mean to be human, and how closely do we guard nature's original design against scientific advances, personal liberties (abortion, made-to-order children...), etc.? Just questions to answer questions, I know... someone smarter than me can figure it out.
And by introducing abortion-related musings into the conversation, please allow me to apologize for bringing us that much closer to invoking Godwin (as abortion discussions almost always spiral downwards) In my defense, the issue *does* raise similiar concerns/issues/questions.
My sig sucks.