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Judge Finds Major DNA Patent Invalid
cswiii writes "In what some Slashdot readers might consider a breath of fresh air, a judge in San Francisco ruled that a patent on DNA replication and analysis was questionably obtained and thus, invalid. An appeal has already been promised by the defendants. " Whew. There's some form of sanity left in the world I guess. Reversing the Taq DNA Polyemerase patent is a pretty major deal for genetic research - it makes PCR much easier to perform.
The new "mix" you refer to was the discovery of Taq DNA polymerase. DNA polymerase is found in every living cell, and it serves to synthesize DNA from individual nucleotides (A,T,C,G). Hence, it is essential to PCR, which is basically just the repeated copying/synthesis of a DNA fragment.
The original DNA polymerase used in PCR was not thermostable, meaning that it couldn't withstand high temperatures. Each PCR cycle requires a high-temperature step to separate the DNA strands, hence, early PCRs required the addition of new polymerase during each cycle. This was labor intensive and impractical.
Taq DNA polymerase is extracted from thermus aquaticus, a bacteria originally found in thermal vents in Yellowstone. Because this bacteria lived in such incredibly hot conditions, its DNA polymerase was thermostable. Taq polymerase is still used today in the vast majority of the world's PCR reactions.
Sooooo...the patent that you refer to was indeed the really evil insidious stupid kind of patent that we all despise--the patenting of discovered genes. I say good riddance to this patent. May the USPTO realize the error of its ways...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
In a nutshell, the process allows a small piece of DNA which was cut out of the genome to be amplified (replicated) repeatedly a few million times. This allows genetecists to examine the piece of DNA on a large scale, therby eliminating a lot of expensive equipment. By staggering the enzymes which are cutting the piece out, the genetic code can be read out directly for a lot of bases at once.
While I believe that patenting of DNA sequences is something we have to come to grips with (and hopefully outlaw), this patent definitely does not fall into that category. If anything, this is a really really elegant hack which allows DNA to be examined by making lots of copies quickly and cheaply. This makes it possible for anyone to do the research. Essentially they are trying to open up the sequencing by coming up with an ingenius technique.
I also really take offense to people who cheer or boo this decision without taking a look at content and only look at the subject heading! Read something carefully before spouting off an opinion and maybe you'll actually make sense.
It's funny because it's true -- Homer J.
While this is great there decision wasn't one of "prior art" as much as it was:
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker on Tuesday upheld a challenge by
Promega Corp., which argued that scientists got the important patent in
1990 by misrepresenting their experiments and falsely claiming advances
over previous discoveries.
So it sounds to me like it was more for scientific technical reasons. It also sounds like there is another company that could come forward and gets patents like this one. What do you guys think? Same interpretation?
If it is the way I think it is, there really hasn't been any breakthrough...
I'd just like to comment on what I think is ignorance about geneomics. You have an idea for an invention, you spend tonnes of time an money developing it and you make something, and sell it to make a profit so that you can pay back all your staff so they can buy food and healthcare and all those wonderful things. It would really be unfair for anyone else to step in the middle, copy you work and claim it as theirs and make a profit when you did all the development, that's why a patent makes sense. You spend a tonne of mony researching a particular nucleic acid sequence, beg for funding from rich people and eventulay you have something that you can make some money off of because you've proven it to be safe and beneficial, and you patent your invention (yes it is an invention, even with natural sequences it requires a lot of work in order to determine what they do, you should really have patent rights if you discover the function/purpose of things so complex). Someone could copy your sequence with a pen and paper and claim it as theirs when you've given your sweat and blood finding it; it makes sense to patent such things becuase like all things, they cost time effort and money, those investments have to be so people can make a living just like any other product.
The process of the PCR (that's the right abbreviation) is a very patentable process. It's a mix of using bacterial enzymes (which was what the patent was about) and putting it into a thermocycler (it simply raises and drops the temperature over and over) with the segment of DNA and primers and an hour later you have billions of copies of sequence you're interested in.
The idea of putting it all together is rather simple when you thing about it, but it's still a stroke of genius. That patent still holds if I remember well (but no money went to the inventor though). At the begininng, you had to put a new enzyme mix at each cycle because the heat would destroy it. If I understand it well, the patent in question was about another mix that can survive the temperature, so you put it once and forget about it. So THAT patent was more of using something that already exist in nature (and not a new process).
Processes like that are and should be patentable because they are still brilliant inventions with a human mechanical side and they're the ones that helps the science go advance so fast these days.
It's selfish and downright rediculous to expect companies to simply donate their research to the public domain.
Fuck yeah, after Amazon spent all that time researching ways to make people more prone to shopping, it is only right that they should get a patent on the fantasticly novel and difficult to invent idea of storing peoples CCN on the server! How awefully selfish of us! And my god, if that guy had not had the patent incentive for spending the millions on research it took to come up with the idea of letting the computer use common sense to know what century it was, Y2K would really have been the end of the world!
In theory patents are a difficult issue. I happen to be against them on idealogical grounds, as I believe in the freedom of thought and information above all else, and that laws trying to controll these freedoms are not only wrong but futile and dangerous. The way my life is heading now, it looks like I'm going to towards scientific research, and I promise that I will never take a patent, and I will think long and hard before taking a job with a company that wants to patent my discoverees. Research does not have to be based on corporate gain, but could be based on the ideas of the free software movement (which oviously works, and well) instead. BUT, that does not mean I don't recognize the value of patents in encouraging a lot of the research that has made technical progress move so damn fast this century. It is not an easy issue, and getting rid of patents all together would be a very difficult change for society.
However, the way patents are practiced nowadays makes it much more simple. The stupidity of patent regristration agencies, here in the EU but mostly in the US, has made being anatagonistic towards patents so very rewarding. A lot of people don't even stop think about WHY patents are used (in order to even out DISADVANTAGE a company that makes new inventions has to others who copy them), but instead think of it as a right that inventors have, making invention a sort of lottery of being able to patent things that will be thought up by other people and used in the future. How much research time does B&N really gain by copying Amazons one-click-time thing? 17 years????? And does the McDonald-Douglas guy with the Y2K patent need to be protected from others who would want to implement an idea common in speech for many centuries (anyone who remembers life before this decade will remember history books refering to "the ninetees" and meaning the 1890s)?
If patents really are a "a necessary evil" as you put it, then how come they are not used sparingly and only in fields where they are considered necessary? How come our legislaters are looking INCREASING patent times rather than decreasing them, although the current patent length is clearly enough make companies invent things? How come we are ready to let people take patents in every new field that comes along without stopping for one second to question if it is a good idea? How come we are letting people patent things that are nothing but ideas and bussiness models? How come we allow people patent mathematical techniques, the equivalent of Newton having patented integration or Euler having patented ways of drawing the paths of differential equations? How come we allowing patents so general they next to cover an entire field, let alone just one invention? I could go on...
Patents may be able to do a lot of good for society in the short term, but the way they are praticed today they are doing a hell of a lot of bad instead. Defending the idea of patents has become as stupid as defending communism on with the defense that it would work if people were just noble and selfless. As programmers, we know when a routine is so full of holes, problems, exceptions, and spagetti code that the time has come to toss it out and rewrite it completely, even if it is a bit of an effort. That hour has struck for the patent system.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
unfortunately, the patent was ruled against only because of impropriety in the application/description (representing that it was more significant a change than it was from previous knowledge).
The ruling I'd like very much to see is that genetic patents aren't enforcable/legitimate at all, due to the fact that they are merely discoveries.
Of course, this patent dealt with a specific PROCESS, not a true genetic patent, so I can at least understand why that could/should be protected.
Hopefully this will at least slow down the idiotic rate at which biotech patents are being applied for, as it tells the companies that sloppiness or misrepresentation in the application will invalidate the discovery. Since most of the genetic patents are being done through brute-force methods and applied for as fast as they can type the pages, this may inject a modicum of restraint...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I was hoping it would say that patents on DNA were illegal. But it didn't. It said these particular scientists used deception to try and patent something which they didn't invent.
:-)
In fact, this is evidence of a disaster.
The patent office obviously didn't do enough work to determine whether the proposed patent was credible--they just rubber stamped it, and left it for the courts to work out. Since the courts are incredibly expensive, that puts a challenge to a patent like this out of reach to the average person. It took a corporate adversary with a legal team to defeat it.
Not something that you and me and your favorite free software development team will benefit from. Well... maybe now that VA and Red Hat are worth a gazillion dollars we can finally get some of those lawyers fighting for the right team