Working Around Patents with Evolutionary Design 121
An anonymous reader writes "Using computational trial-and-error allowed a Stanford team to come up with a patent-free WiFi antenna. Patent rules are tricky to formulate as self-interest dictates that the claim is as general as possible. Patent fences effectively can build a substantive competitive barrier to markets. Using evolutionary tactics may be a way to legally and ethically bypass these roadblocks."
Evolved antennas at NASA (Score:4, Informative)
Koza's Patents (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps they'll be blocked by Koza's patents on genetic programming [genetic-programming.com].
It was not evolution! (Score:4, Informative)
And if you want it to stay anywhere near halfway sane, write your Senators and tell them to vote against their new "patent reform" bill. That would change the law to award patents to the first who apply for a patent, rather than the first to invent. Talk about stifling innovation! That would give all the advantages to corporate lawyers, and our patent system would fail completely in its purpose.
Re:Evolved antennas at NASA (Score:3, Informative)
Remember, "the current patent system is bad, mmkay?"
Especially as you have to "waste" engineering effort to work around it.
Re:"Evolutionary tactics..." nonsense. (Score:2, Informative)
genetic mutation comes in several forms, some are more common than others and sometimes the sequence being mutated can affect the rate of its own mutation (and even this can happen either biochemically or by following genetic instructions that affect mutation rate).
1. Point mutations.
Clearly you've heard of this--this is what you are colloquially referring to as "mutation". This is gain, loss or replacement of a single base. Due to the degenerate nature of the triplet code, most replacement point mutations that occur within a gene are effectively silent, not causing any change in the resulting protein. Of course, many more happen outside the coding regions of genes and typically do nothing. When the point mutation causes a change to the amino acid sequence, the protein still might not be affected. If the amino acid substitution of the same type (e.g., both hydrophobic or both acidic) the protein function might be unaltered. Or it might be impreceptibly altered. This creates very important variety in proteins that allows an individual in changing circumstances to adapt. Of course, sometimes, and maybe most often, the protein performs worse. If it's bad enough, that mutation is removed from the gene pool along with the individual possessing it.
Insertion and deletion of a single base is very similar to the next category, so I'll discuss them there.
2. Insertion and deletion of 1 or more bases.
This is a real problem for genes. If the insertion or deletion is a multiple of 3, then there's a chance nothing will happen but 1 amino acid will be gained or lost, but potentially not affecting the function of the protein. But there's also a good chance the protein will be severely altered, because from the mutation onward, the frame of 3-bases per amino acid will be off, and now you'll end up with a completely different string of amino acids. Chances are they'll do nothing, but sometimes they do something. If the protein is lost completely, then there may or may not be a problem to the organism. You've got two copies of most genes, and the second copy might be able to compensate for the bad protein. If so, this becomes what people call a recessive mutation, meaning if you've only got 1 "bad" allele, you're all right, but if both alleles are "bad" you suffer. Sometimes the truncated protein is worse than missing, though. Sometimes the shortened form works well enough to go through all the motions of being a protein (going where needed, binding to its partners, etc.) but then fails to carry out its job and at the same time interferes with the "normal" copy. This becomes what we call a dominant mutation and it's really bad news. Insertions or deletions are fairly common in certain types of sequences but for the most part, the quality control machinery can catch them and fix or destroy the aberrant cell.
3. Translocation and duplication events.
This is a specialized type of insertion, in which a whole section of DNA is either extracted and inserted elsewhere, or copied and the copy is inserted elsewhere. Extraction-insertion is not necessarily a problem, since you've got a net gain of 0 new sequence. The gene is still present and probably still functions normally, it just lives in a different location now. Sometimes this is a problem, if it is translocated without its regulatory machinery, so that now it doesn't activate at the right time or make the proper dose of protein. Sometimes the regulation is only slightly tweaked, again allowing for a slight variation of the protein function in an organism, which can be useful when the population is facing novel or changing conditions. Sometimes this causes cancer.
With duplication, evolution is most free to act in a good way. This is the wholesale copying and inserting of the copy in a new place. Often the new copy is put next to the original, but not always. With two fully functioning copies of the same gene, a rendundancy is built in, superior to the one created by having two alleles (one on each chromosome). Later
Re:That's great! (Score:2, Informative)