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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.'"
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
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
Here's the patent application.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Soviet Russia called to collect their patent dues. They just patented YOU!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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
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.