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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.
Nah, this is more likely because of the republican administration and the likely implication of granting this patent.
What? A bunch of human-monkey hybrids that will certainly vote Democrat?!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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!
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!
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
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.]
....can be seen here:
1 /i mages/michael_jackson.jpg
http://www.histar.com/mornings/starchive/2002/1
no I think the implication is that the pressure from the whacko-religious near-terrorist christian extremists would become to much to bear if the governament started patenting human-animal chimeras. It would errode the sacredicity of humanity by forcing them to move from their present all-or-nothing view humans, i.e. that thing god created first to an actual definition that would stand muster in a secular legal scope.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
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."
"I expect the Religious Right will end up getting steam-rolled over the genetic engineering issue"
Well American bible thumpers have a multipart strategy for countering the hordes of 7.5 feet tall Chinese with the 220 IQ:
- Nuclear weapons, lots of nuclear weapons, so if the good lord wont start the rapture they can give him(or her) a hand with an artificial one. The U.S. government is apparently starting work on two new warhead designs, in defiance of several efforts by Congress to stop it, one really big and one really small. If the Republican's hold power a little while longer its likely we will see them break the global test ban treaty and start firing off nukes again. The test ban will most likely land in the same dumper as the ABM treaty, and the Kyoto accords, and the Geneva conventions on treating prisoners, Geneve conventions on treating civilians in occupied countries, U.S laws against torture, U.S. laws on due process, and of course the Constitution.
- Missile defense, it probably doesn't work but if it did it would keep the super intelligent Chinese from shooting back
- Stamp out birth control and abortion. Most religions do everything in their power to maximize population growth to increase the size of their flock, even if it does mean massive overpopulation. The Chinese are, by contrast aggressively trying to control population growth so maybe the bible thumpers, given enough time can out breed and out number them. There will be irony if in the next big war there will be a billion American soldiers, praising Jesus, as they use human waves to overwhelm the tiny Chinese Army, big and intelligent though they may be.
If the Chinese do all develop 220 IQ's there is a chance they might all become extremely enlightened and liberal. That means they will probably unilaterally disarm, and will be reluctant to start a war.
In this area low IQ Americans have a huge advantage. They will bankrupt their country buying weapons, and more weapons, and they are willing to use them at a drop of a hat.
I guess I'm saying is its possible geneticly engineering, super intelligent Chinese might be sitting ducks for low IQ, bigoted, hate filled, bible thumping Americans, who'll push the button in the name of Jesus.
@de_machina