Word: patentable
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When GE tried to patent the bacterium in 1972 under Chakrabarty's name...
...patent officials balked. They argued, in effect, that if either Jefferson or Congress had intended life to be patentable, special laws would not have been needed to protect certain new plant hybrids like the Red American Beauty Rose. But when GE pressed its case, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals rejected the Government's argument, and the Supreme Court last week went along with that position. As Chief Justice Burger explained, the issue is "not between living and inanimate things, but between products of nature-whether living or not -and human-made inventions...
With so much research already going on, the Supreme Court's decision mainly gives formal sanction to what had been happening for some time, a classic example of the law's lagging behind technology. Millions of dollars have been invested without patent protection. Says Bernard Talbot, special assistant to the director of the National Institutes of Health: "Recombinant DNA work is going on in numerous labs. This would have gone on whatever the court decided." Chief Justice Burger himself acknowledged that a patent law "will not deter the scientific mind from probing into the unknown any more than...
...most important patent application now pending is for the key gene-splicing processes developed by Microbiologists Stanley Cohen of Stanford and Herbert Boyer of the University of California: both have signed over royalty rights to their respective universities, but Boyer is a major stockholder in Genentech Corp., a Bay Area genetic engineering firm, and obviously stands to make money from the process. No one quarrels with that. But there is a mixed view of just how much good will accrue from the introduction of patents to the infant industry...
There will almost certainly be efforts to get around the patents of others through slight variations. Says James Watson, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer in the 1950s of the double-helix structure of DNA: "It will be awfully hard to show uniqueness, to prove that one man's microbe is really different from another's." That, says J. Leslie Glick, president of Genex Corp. in Bethesda, Md., could lead to modifying bacterial strains mainly for "defensive reasons, a waste of research." Lawyers especially stand to gain if patenting life becomes their way of making a handsome living. Quipped...