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Venter Institute Claims Patent on Synthetic Life
jimsnail writes "J. Craig Venter and the Institute that bears his name are again moving into new territory in the field of genetics. Genetic patents, that is. They are seeking a broad patent that would give them ownership of a 'free living organism that can grow and replicate' constructed entirely from synthetic DNA. The ETC Group is challenging the claim. 'Scientists at the institute designed the bacterium to have a "minimal genome"--the smallest set of genes any organism can live on. The project, which began in the early 2000s, was partly a philosophical exercise: to help define life itself better by identifying its bare-bones requirements. But it was also fraught with commercial possibilities: if one could reliably recreate a standardized, minimal life form, other useful genes could be added in as needed for various purposes.'"
I just patented DNA replication. That's right. J. Craig Vetner, along with everyone else here, must pay up now, be sued, or die.
My blog
Uh, doesnt that seem rather overbroad? I mean, there's nothing about methodology, just 'we own any synthetic life.' What utter bullshit. Why dont they try to patent nonsynthetic life while they're at it?
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
You can't hug your children with synthetic DNA arms!
now hold the responsible for anything that happens from any synthetic life. Lets see how fast the back peddle.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Needs to be culled from the gene pool.
If God (or someone else) did truly intelligently design life, that would mean all life forms are synthetic. Hence, prior art exists.
Did I just discover a scientifically *useful* application of ID wack-theory? If so, is the universe going to implode, or am I about to be flamed to fiery hell by people who never evolved a sarcasmeter?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
... you know... slavery. Lol, I keeed, I keeed. But if they do make sentient synthetic life in the future...
Sorry, you were patented....please pay $xx,xxx.xx in order to continue living!
The institute has also purchased Ventnor Ave. and is in the process of putting up several pricey Hotels. A sign in the front window of the first reads, "No Shoes, No hat, No service." The local dog could not be reached for comment and the car was in jail at the time.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
My god. I can't believe they went ahead and patented sperm from someone who's been *hiccup* drinking and using Viagra
Infiltrated dot Net
This reminds me of the story of the person that tried to patent boiling water, no one had done it before so it was worth a try wasn't it?
If anyone at the patent office lets this pass he/she should get whacked with the giant hammer of reason. You can't go around getting patents for entire fields of science.
Here's the patent application.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I mean, these synthetics have got to be smart enough to run for Congress, or do other jobs humans won't do.
sigs, as if you care.
ok then I'll patent a critical gene that this guy has in his DNA and pull a MAFIAA on him if he reproduces. then have genes renamed "files" and if he ever tries to hire a hooker it'll be illegal file sharing :)
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Who owns the patent on life in southern West Virginia?
I've been there a few times, and there are quite a few living on the minimum requirements for gene usage.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
My reaction to this is mixed. First, I'm suspicious of this kind of sweeping patent protection in general. And it is far from clear (in the cited article at least) that they actually have such a genome yet, so patent protection seems strange. "We think we are going to do this, so grant us a patent."
On the other hand it may take 20 years or so to actually be able to use this kind of technology in meaningful ways (and have drugs produced this way approved by the government). So granting patent protection now means that it would expire just about the time that people might be able to take advantage of it.
On the other other hand, if they really are patenting the idea, they'll probably re-patent (or extend the patent with new claims or however that works) any usable variation when they actually get it so they're likely to find ways to stretch such patent protection out for quite a while.
Patents are a means of preventing people from making productive use of the technology and information available to them. This creates artificial scarcity, which ultimately makes a lot of money for a very few people. It also technologically and practically impoverishes the rest of the world (by preventing collaboration and also production).
I am very familiar with the economic arguments about needing to secure a return on investment, and they are bunk. The most glaring part of it is the fallacy of excluded middle (or slippery slope), stated: "If a company can't guarantee that it makes all the money that there is to be made on this idea, and that nobody else makes any money on it, then the company won't be able to make any money at all on it." Lies...there is plenty of money to be made selling a product in the face of competition...in fact our whole economy is built around the need for this.
On top of that...where there is a demand there is a supply. For example, if people need some disease cured, but no drug company wants to invest the RnD funding to make medicine for it...which is unlikely...but even if it does happen money can also come from private donations and government grants. One way or another, the problems will be solved, and patents are not needed.
So, IMO, patents give us nothing of value and deprive us of the ability to work together and to make productive use of the information available to us.
Thought control is bad.
I claim prior art. God.
Would someone out there with time please recreate the badger-badger/mushroom-mushroom flash animation with the following:
... settlement... settllllment
(badgers, badgers, badgers becomes) patents, patents, patents
(mushroom, mushroom becomes) lawsuit, lawsuit
(snake part goes) Out-of Court settlement! Settlement
Etc.
Thanks. I have no skills.
Cheers,
Mike...
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Karen Travis SF books about a future Earth where all life has been patented and copyrighted to the point that it's illegal to have unaltered seeds is starting to become true.
From the article: "The researchers filed their patent claim on the artificial organism and on its genome."
These guys have created a brand new form of life from the ground up and are patenting their particular genome. It's hard work, and certainly not obvious or trivial. Given that other biological systems are patentable (e.g., the Harvard mouse, new strains of wheat), this certainly seems to clear the bar for patentability.
Venter isn't claiming a patent on the entire concept of synthetic life, he's claiming a patent on A synthetic life form. As the article says, patents on genetically modified life forms aren't anything new. What's new is this is a life form created entirely from scratch (or at least as much from scratch as you can get when you already know how other life works).
AccountKiller
..but I have no life. If anyone wants me, I'm in the basement.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Seems as though a patent for artificial life, belonging to one Victor Frankenstein, has already expired. Along with a sub-category submitted by Abby Normal, signed off by The Man with Two Brains.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This one will probably bring a very interesting court case into the patent world. Technically it is a patentable idea, but when it comes down to it the courts will probably see how general what they are claiming really is as it is the start of a whole new field of study. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
There's no prior art yet, and it's inevitable.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
My son.
I used the GATC encoding scheme.
All your offspring are belong to me.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Presumably, this is a part of the transition to an "IP economy", and they've been instructed to keep lower standards as to make sure most of the IP cake has been divided before the international competition becomes too rough.
And then they use heavy-handed tactics to force other countries to submit, misusing the Berne convention and the WTO, forcing the world to implement patent and copyright law that doesn't reflect the original intentions behind patents and copyright at all.
Patents and copyright as they have become does no longer serve the interests of society, nor even the long-term interests of the companies that gain them.
It's been said before, but I can't seem to find the original quote, that the emergence of the Internet wouldn't have been possible if patents had been used then as it is today. What other emerging markets are we closing down with these overbroad patents? What does this madness really cost us? There's no way we can know.
Of course, the harder they tighten their grip, the more nations will start slipping through their fingers
I wonder when the first real copyright/patent/data havens show up. Imagine the advantages companies located within such a nation would get. Of course, they would be unlikely to be allowed to sell their wares on the open market, but the citizens within this country could possibly rise to a much higher standard of living, and of course smuggling would be extremely lucrative...
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I've filed my patent for the inert gas we know as air. If they want to be able to breathe, they'll have to license their patent to me in exchange for using my patented product.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
It sounds to me like they are patenting a specific organism, not the concept of building one from scratch. I could be wrong about that, but that's how I read it. While it it is derived from a natural organism with much stuff removed, it seems more palatable to me than patenting regular food with one or two features added. I don't like either practice, but this seems less bad than what Monsanto is doing.
If they are patenting the "organism from scratch" concept, then the problem doesn't seem to be ethical, it's that people are upset that they'll be locked out of a new field for 20 years. Those don't come along very often, but they do come along and people do get patents on them. The one very far reaching one that comes to my mind is the one on controlling an airplane. Sure, the guys had a lock on a revolutionary new industry for some time. Then like all good "IP" it expired.
I just patented DNA replication.
Did I mention I patented the GATC encoding scheme as a business process?
Don't tell anyone, but I'm working on some improvements using mRNA, sRNA, and other fun things that let me express many different proteins from the same DNA chain.
I'd ask to digest this information, but I just patented that, so hold that thought.
Oh, and since thought is a biochemical process, you owe me royalties on that one too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Perhaps everyone should patent their own genomes. (Would the lack of having the actual sequence be a problem for the patent office? Hard to believe.) Then everyone could sue everyone else for infringing.
They tried to make boiling sea water illegal. Lost a bit of real estate in that move, they did...
Then why was my application to patent Dick Cheney rejected?
I patented Creation. That's right. Anything and everything. God's getting a call from my lawyers.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I though that ideas could not be patented? Are they saying they have the ability to do this already? If they can't do it, isn't it just an idea? It's pretty easy to come up with ideas but much harder to implement an ideal into something that is real.
While I am laughing about this silly patent, I am more concerned about the safety of what ever is created.
I don't believe the GM crops are 100% safe. GM crops are not hybrid crops.
because everything have to settled in a court these days... anyway who's the other part here?
They are trying to patent the minimum genome neccesary for this particular bacteria to exist. It's no different than any other attempts to patent the parts or the whole genome of certain organisms. IMHO, it a big deal about nothing, I don't see how is genetically engineered bacteria any different than a patenting a machine that does the same job. The patent is very specific as to the length and variations in the genome sequence and could not be applied (as far as I can tell) to synthetic life in general.
Since patents are now 20 years from application date, this presages an interesting court case. What happens if the patent is still in force when this new lifeform is old enough to vote?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
in Venter Institute geneticists patent you
?
Ok, so what do we know?
Lifeforms reproduce themselves, patterning surrounding matter and
energy into more of their own form.
Over several billions of years, natural ecosystems have evolved
checks and balances on overabundance of any particular lifeform.
Other lifeforms co-evolved and the lifeforms limit each other
(by eating each other, by competing for the same resources, etc.)
The ecosystems change, but rather gradually, as many stalemates
(equilibria) in the energy and strategy balance of the
competitive patterning game evolve.
So now we have Joe or Jane Scientist, or gene-engineer, thinking
"I'm pretty damn smart. I know my sh*t.
Got it 'Piled higher & Deeper' in fact.
Why don't I just unleash my patented self-replicating, resource-patterning
machine, and let's see what happens.
On the bright side, most things they could come up with will be no match
for the 3 billion year evolved competition.
On the other side, they could be unlucky, and make something that no other
lifeform recognized, or could eat, or could compete with for resources.
Oh, too bad. Start game over.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Is/are God/god/gods referenced as prior art on the patent application?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Sounds like they are gearing up for the replicant market.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For that reason alone, it should not be patentable.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Balmer chair joke making slashdolts already qualify as the simplest life form. ;)
"But it was also fraught with commercial possibilities" Your new overlords welcome those oh so evil commercial possibilites. A better word would have been Ripe not Fraught.
I invented boobs.
I deserve the Nobel prize for all of time.
now hold them responsible for anything that happens from any synthetic life. Lets see how fast the back peddle.
They are already responsible for that. Everyone is responsible for the consequences of their actions.
There are fundamental problems patenting life. Life replicates itself, life is not an invention and human life should never be owned.
Patents work by keeping people from making the patented article. Applying a patent to an article which reproduces itself is silly. Anyone who owns such an object will be violating the patent. I could make up some reasoning around this, but it would put the created rights of the patent above the natural rights of the owner.
Genetic sequences, no matter how clever, are discoveries not inventions. In order to qualify as an invention, the patent applicant should be made to prove that their particular sequence does not and never has existed in nature. The impossibility of the task highlights the absurdity of the patent itself.
Finally, if genetic sequences can be patented parts of you and me are owned by the patent holder. In the limit, a company could patent a human being, which is obviously wrong.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A lot of them never breed, and never move out of their parent's basement!
Patent official (I hope they are at least this intelligent): What type of life do you wish to patent.
Fool: NO. I want to patent ALL life.
Patent Official: Why, there might be prior art.
Fool: NO, everyone else made "natural life", I am going to patent life that anyone makes, i.e. SYTNETHETIC life.
Patent Official: Have you heard of God? He is this big, super-powerfull creature that some people think may have created life. That means that all life is synthetic, and priror art exists.
Fool: I am atheistic, I don't belive in God.
Patent Official: Regardless, the jewish bible is supposed to be 5000 years old, and we definitely have copies of it that are more than 1,000 years old, and even if you personally don't believe in god, it accurately describes life as being artificially created by a creature, and therefore prior art to your moronic synthetic life idea exists. It does not matter if the prior art was in a work of fiction or not. Now get out of hear before we stone you to death for being an obnoxios Patent abusing athiestic piece of crap.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
HA! I one upped you! I patented RNAML a markup language used to model RNA and DNAML and anything like it. You'll all screwed as you can no longer describe what you want to patent.
MUHAHAHAHAHA! MUHAHAHAHA!
Evil genius is me!
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Life is wet, then you dry.
I'm a GRA in a biomedical lab and took a course once on bioengineering, the topic of the patent.
As mentioned previously they're not patenting synthetic life but a specific minimal set of genes required to produce a replicating bacterium. There was a non-trivial amount of work that went into researching these genes and determining the least combinations necessary for replication in a solution that provides all the basic building blocks (ie. this bacteria will not be synthesizing its own amino acids, I would imagine).
This is could be important for industrial biosynthetic applications. Every protein expressed by a bacteria increases its metabolic load and decreases the efficiency with which it can convert input (sugars, amino acids, nucleotides) into the desired output (insulin, drugs, other useful biocompounds). By determining the minimum necessary set of genes for replication a ground-state bacteria has been designed that can be used as the starting point for designing more efficient expression systems.
It also allows these expression systems to be more fully characterized which can help when attempting to determine and modulate the effect metabolic load and evolution will have on a vat of bacteria as it progresses from generation to generation. One problem with these systems is that synthesizing extra compounds increases the metabolic and decreases the replication rate. If it is possible for the bacteria to mutate and stop expression of the product their metabolic load decreases and they begin to replicate faster; this causes vats of bacteria to tend to evolve such that they stop producing the useful compound. There are ways to get around this (such as turning production on and off using external chemical signals, tying production to survival, etc.) that might be optimized in such a minimal system. Engineering life is tricky because of the extremely high number of potential interactions to be analyzed for every new configuration; it is more difficult because many of these interactions can't be calculated or simulated.
This patent won't be all that useful for more complex human proteins as these require an array of post-translational modification proteins that change the product after the initial synthesis; thus they require a correspondingly complex expression system derived from a yeast cell or an animal cell (I think some worms have been used to develop complex expression systems); Alternately bacteria can be modified to produce the modification proteins. These expression systems have doubtless already been patented or are no longer patentable, so this new patent probably won't be very useful until it is bundled with a set of associated patents for efficient expression systems for various compounds.
... and should we even regard such creations as living?
Why not just refer to them as "autonomous bio-chemical machines" and simply avoid the philosophical overhead that is sure to come from claiming you are frankensteining artificial creatures in some dark laboratory located in our back yard?
I'd question if "Life" is soon going to be someone's registered trademark, but apparently Mikey already squatted it a few decades ago...
8==8 Bones 8==8
In their U.S. patent application published May 31, Institute scientists chose a somewhat more robust 381 to 386 genes as their "minimal genome" for a hypothetical microbe, based on M. genitalium, but dubbed Mycoplasma laboratorium.
Please note the weasel word HYPOTHETICAL in the quote; they have in fact NOT established that they have figured out how to make one of these, but want to patent it now in case someone else figures it out first. This is the very essence of (one form of) patent abuse!
Another poster says: These guys have created a brand new form of life from the ground up and are patenting their particular genome. It's hard work, and certainly not obvious or trivial. But no, in fact they have not created a new form of life from the ground up.
Yes, but I used siRNA to silence your patent.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've always been a free market kind of guy. As long as the rights and safety of people are not harmed, go for it. BUT, there are limits to this. I feel that patenting ANY form of life, natural or lab-made, is way over the line. I feel that patenting DNA or any section of DNA from any living organism is over the line, down right offensive. I don't feel this out of some possibly misguided, possibly correct religious belief. I just don't get how you can patent something that evolved naturally. Maybe some strip of DNA/RNA/etc that was artificially created and inserted into a life form, but not the life form itself nor any part of it. Such patenting needs to be stopped and is an example of just how far the US (and other governments) have gone toward protecting business and destroying proper ethics.
You and your infestation of stinking synthmicrobes
are not coming into my igloo!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Damnit! And you're on Sisters of Elune too! You must be one of those guys vexing me in the Battlegrounds! Curses! Now it's happening on Slashdot! Foiled again...
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
All your (genomes) bases belong to us
not unless you're a blood elf ... I'm in the Cult of Foamy ... (e.g. Palo is the leader, and then there's Foamee and Magistra)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Reference:
Eigen and Oehlenschlager, 30 years later - a new approach to Sol Spiegelman's and Leslie Orgel's in vitro evolutionary studies: dedicated to Leslie Orgel on the occasion of his 70th birthday, M. Eigen and F. Oehlenschlager, Orig. Life Evol. Biosph. 5-6 (1997), 437-457. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/subcellular.html#EO Spiegelman's monster
Us, the techies can decide:
Either being eaten by patented green goo or slaughtered by open sourced nano tech mini robotic gray goo!
Make up your minds - on which side are you standing?
Life 2.0 vs. Gray Goo - get on your keyboards, vent (!) it out! ms
Uhh,...previous art. Life has been on this planet since before the Patent Office.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
If a random patented virus epidemics outbursts, do we have to buy patented drugs?
I don't feel like it...
Nobody has yet mentioned Kent.
4 6154
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2001/08/
Kent wouldn't exist as a real American hero, if it wasn't for the villian, Venter, and his company Celera.
If not for Kent, the human genome would be patented right now by Celera, which would be one of the highest valued companies in the world due to the royalties that you and I would be paying right now and for the next fifteen years.
Make no mistake, this company is a real-life villian, and giving them this patent only means more economic hardship for you and I, even though I acknowledge that under current law they should be given the patent.
I wonder.... in a million years, will these little fuckers come to the conclusion that intelligent design was a crock of shit?
*ponders*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
I predict that a privatly owned racing sailboat filled with cash and a military crew will soon be heading to the Camen islands again.
The USPTO is probably the biggest reason why technological achievements are now being made ELSEWHERE.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
*pulls up his chairdog*
The fact that they're patenting synthetic life is just a formality. The fact that they're patenting it, now that's something to discuss.
.. the USA tries to force others to adopt their copyright and patent laws.
Damn, gotta start using condoms again...
There are several hundred to several thousand other chemicals that must be working in addtion to DNA before a truly artificial organism is constructed. No one knows all what these are yet. It may take decades to solve this.
A few throwbacks claim that life can only come from life, i.e. there is some inherent patterns in the cells you just cant recreate from inert chemicals. Other claim some life energy or essence, but I think thats a supersition.
The previous attempt at synthetic life was some viruses from scratch. They tried this with polio, but some it wasn't infectious because something was still missing.
I for one welcome our synthetic minimal overlords
The patent application (read it) is clearly not claiming "synthetic life". Journalists (alas, including Slashdot) often have no clue "how to hang a major story". ("MicrobeSoft" *is* a major story, and from a number of viewpoints...). For a scientific analysis, see SlashDot and other coverage in http://www.junkdna.com/ . Commentator (A. Pellionisz) welcomes public replies here, or privately at pellionisz_at_junkdna.com
Seriously though what happens if a patented artificial microbe happens to be a virus that infects everyone and replaces part of everyone's DNA with its DNA -- and surreptitiously also encodes the numbers "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" into your DNA? Or even if someone adds a really short song into a piece of DNA and then it goes and copies itself over and over and over again? How much would you owe the RIAA if it made a million copies? A billion? And then you share it with 2 of your closest friends, and they share the musical virus with their friends?