Judge Finds Major DNA Patent Invalid 171
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.
Re:About time, but... (Score:1)
Well, I have nothing against patents of processes to do with DNA. I think that if somebody came up with a creative idea of solving a technical difficulty in dealing with DNA, there's nothing wrong with him patenting it. But what is problematic is if he tries patenting stuff to do with the DNA itself -- eg., patenting a particular DNA sequence that he found that others haven't found yet. It's patents like that that are scary, because ultimately it boils down to a group of people controlling the use of something which is found in nature.
But of course, the other extreme can go wrong too, in fact, very wrong. The main problem being that in a leading-edge technology like this, techniques that are "obvious" to whoever is in the field may not be obvious at all to whoever is working in the patent office. Then somebody could just go and patent something that looks innovative and creative but which can easily be found by whoever's in the field if they worked at it. This could be the source of silly patents and "obvious" patents which lets companies or a few individuals "control" an obvious technique and leech money off everybody else in the field for using it or "re-discovering" it.
Re:PRC? (Score:2)
They abbreviated it at PRC in the article too which is wierd. I would have expected a source like this to have gotten a simple abbreviation like this correct.
Slightly more on topic now...
It wasn't mentioned in the article, but Taq polymerase is a naturally occuring enzyme, which I would not expect to be patentable. However, many biotech companies have introduced modified Taq enzymes (eg that are less error prone, more efficient, etc) which I would expect to be patentable. The article does not mention if they were attempting to patent the naturally occuring or a modified form of the enzyme.
Mike
stickler, I is (Score:1)
Polymerase Chain Reaction
not the People's Republic of China
sorry.
Re:language, prior art (Score:1)
Waaayyy off-topic (Score:1)
Note to US Voters that may be reading this: One of the big names in the PMRC back in the music labelling/censorship debate in the 80's was Tipper Gore, the wife of presidential candidate Al Gore (Mark I). She's one of those "Senators' Wives" who decided that they needed something to do, and became busybodies. Do you want this person living in the White House?
That's pretty damn lame if it's the case... (Score:1)
Taq DNA Polymerase was patented (Score:3)
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...
Re:Slashdot clock off by an hour (NOT!) (Score:1)
Re:Not an interesting decision (Score:1)
I guess this just shows the loose, lax way the patent office handles its stuff, which is sad, letting many absurd patents go through. I'm not saying the people who work there are lazy or anything, but surely they should pay more attention to carefully verifying the patent for originality, contribution, and elibility for patenting?! It's a shame that they keep letting such patents fall through. No wonder people can abuse the patent system so easily, like the one-click shopping stupidity. (Gimme a break, clicking the mouse to shop online is such an original idea is it not?! But anyway, I digress...)
Misleading and erroneous article (Score:2)
Regardless of what you think about the legitimacy of patenting of genetic codes, this has to do with processes and other technologies used to analyze and fabricate DNA, and nothing to do with the actual makeup of the codes.
In addition the article makes the error of claiming that this will make DNA research easier. Quite incorrect. Patent laws ALREADY exempt research activities from any patent infringement claims.
For some basic information on patent laws, this page [promega.com] is useful.
Re:PRC? (Score:2)
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:1)
And just becasue Promega has a patent on Taq polymerase, it doesn't mean you can't make your own. My lab has a freezer full of Taq that we made. It's pretty simple - clone the gene, express it in E. Coli, purify the proteins, heat-kill the unwanted proteins, and viola - hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Taq. As far as I know, as long as we don't try to sell it, this is perfectly legal.
Ruling reasoning could be applied to s/w patents (Score:2)
I love this phrasing! It applies to almost all software patents in existance today.
Too bad the `falsely claiming advances' argument would have to be used to invalidate each software patent one-by-one, instead of en-masse, as they deserve to be.
End of Dot (Score:1)
I wonder if this is the end of
Probably, or at least the end of AC posting. After this Rob will (at the request of Andover) shut down ACs. About a week after that, he'll have to start revoking accounts (starting with grits boy).
Either that, or start having REAL moderation.
On Patents and Financials (Score:2)
Companies, whether large or small, simply cannot afford to fund research without at least some assurance that profit will be made. This typically comes by selling products/services based on ideas that come from that research. However, the company has spent large sums of money generating these new products and services, and needs to protect its investment to keep competitors from stealing their research. This is why companies patent ideas found in their research.
It's selfish and downright rediculous to expect companies to simply donate their research to the public domain. This removes all incentive for the corporation to conduct the research. This is akin to the desire often expressed by
The fact is, patents are a necessary evil. It gives business a reason to pursue research, since it is clear that universities and other government funded institutions (like the military and especially NASA) don't have enough money to do it themselves. Patents ensure that technology moves on.
(Note that this doesn't mean that I support the idea of patenting genes. I think that the idea of having corporations own the very makeup of all human beings proposterous. Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to the obvious question that arises: without the possibility of patens, how do you encourage companies to conduct research?)
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:1)
As for the patent, his name wasn't in the article and the process is a little too straightforward to be invalidated by technical arguments like that. It was new, it worked, it wasn't obvious, we knew for sure who invented it. There's not much space for invalidation there.
Good news (Score:1)
They probably deserve this patent. (Score:3)
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.
well... (Score:5)
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...
Stop thinking... (Score:1)
Mark Duell
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:2)
I wasn't referring to legitimate biotech inventions (like medicines, engineered bacteria or non-obvious chemical processes) -- those are certainly worth the same as any other invention, and have a lot of expensive research behind them. That's why I said I'm at least relieved that this patent was a PROCESS.
I was referring to the dubious and genric genome patents (that you talked about as well), and (in general) the patenting of naturally occuring substances. It just seems ridiculous to claim them as original works...
Re:End of Dot (Score:1)
This still makes me happy (Score:1)
Gene Patenting isn't entirely evil (Score:3)
Carbon & Silicon based life; biotech convergence (Score:1)
Assembly language...deoxyribonucleic acid
semantics
Re:End of Dot (Score:1)
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
Re:well... (Score:1)
RMS sold all of his books before Tom's came to the stores for retail sell. Tom therefore was broke. He also had to pay for the printing of 2,000,000 books. He is currently cleaning Tim O'Reilly's house while wearing a chambermaid outfit.
No, really, it's all good!! (Score:2)
Re:well... (Score:1)
It is weird language, but I'm hoping that it reflects the legal tactic used to oppose the use of the patent. It seems like it could be read: "this molecule was made by nature and you just discovered it and, despite your claims, really didn't do anything to alter it that gives you rights to a patent."
As far as I know, little was done to alter Taq after it was discovered. Maybe I just don't know. Anyway, if it's simply a case that people can't patent naturally occuring substances, then I don't see how genes can be patented. Which would sure be a blessing in the next few decades...
Invicta{HOG}
Re:Not an interesting decision (Score:1)
The patent wasn't on DNA, but rather on an enzyme that was synthesized by that company to better manipulate DNA. It's a chemical, but it's also a tool. I have the feeling that as nano-tech becomes more practical, this grey area will have to be dealt with. So here are some questions for you: :)
how simple does a machine have to get before you can't patent it?
Is a molecule patentable if it's totally synthesized?
For the future: will things like carbon nano-tubes be patentable?
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:3)
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.
Re:On Patents and Financials (Score:2)
Inventions are rarely the result of teamwork or huge projects, they come from individual inspiration, or careful observation. The kind of inventions many corporations do by pouring money and people on a problem are really discoveries, not inventions. Unfortunately since it takes a huge team of lawyers and the contents of a bank or two to get and defend a patent these days, individual inventors are no longer rewarded by patents, they are the domain of corporations.
So for my money, corporations no more belong in the invention business than they do the health care support business. 'Twould be better if a public entity developed ideas and the corporations competed on the implementations. It was once a different world than it is now, and patents did have their purpose then, but I think it has now passed -- they interfere with the expansion of knowledge more than they encourage it.
Re:It's PCR, not PRC. Get your facts right. (Score:1)
and i worked in a dna sequencing lab for 2 years. you learn to hate PCR after a while......
Re:Gene Patenting isn't entirely evil (Score:2)
Re:They probably deserve this patent. (Score:2)
To quible about things that don't really matter...
I'm pretty sure that the HGP isn't using PCR based sequencing. Most genome projects use what is known as shotgun sequencing. In short, PCR requires DNA primers- a template (usually of 18-24 base pairs) of known sequence so that Taq (or another DNA polymerase) can begin DNA synthesis. This obviously requires knowledge of the sequence, and so inorder to sequence the genome this way, you have to sequence a little bit, design new primers, and repeat. The extreme delays in the Drosophila genome project have shown why this method doesn't work.
The HGP uses shotgun sequencing, which basicly involves taking DNA, breaking it up into bits, sticking into a cosmid, and growing up a batch of culture (like E. coli) which contains this cosmid, harvesting the cosmid, and sequencing the insert. Then all of these inserts need to be pieced together- the hard part.
Don't get me wrong- PCR is wonderful. I couldn't do my research without it. (Well, I could, but it would be way harder.) But the HGP isn't the be all and end all of biology, and it isn't using PCR.
Re:On Patents and Financials (Score:2)
Genetic patents are discovery, I think we could all agree on that.
Making something like ethernet is invention. I think we could all agree on that as well.
But what chemical companies that play around in the labs all day long, experimenting with different compounds and energies and the like? There's elements of both things going on. They are discovering the way chemicals behave when mixed together, but they are creating things anew as well.
The problem I see with patents is they too often allow one to patent a discovery, which is basically patenting knowledge.
So what do we do about it?
Re:On Patents and Financials (Score:3)
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.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Re:This still makes me happy (Score:1)
Promega isn't some tiny underdog.
Check their web page...they're gloating already.
PRC?????? (Score:1)
Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR!!!!)
Today's ludicrous patent. (Score:2)
Claim 2: a system as in Claim 1 whereby the details are provided in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator identifying the patent on an Internet accessible patent repository such as the IBM patent site.
Claim 3: a system as in Claim 1 and/or Claim 2 whereby the method of broadcast is an article on a popular portal site such as Slashdot.
Claim 4: a system as in Claims 1-3 whereby the patent applicants are obviously massively taking the piss.
US5443036: Method of exercising a cat [ibm.com]
--
Re:On Patents and Financials (Score:1)
At least in biology/medicine, most of the basic research is still funded by the feds, who currently spend ~$12bn. This pays mostly for discovery of biological operating principles. By the time NIH/academia has invested the 15 years it may take to recognize potential treatments/cures, companies get interested and will be more likely to chip in for the final 5-10 years it takes to get a solution and the very expensive 2 years to get through FDA.
Something else to keep in mind: although devices and novel substances may be patented, the entire process of discovery and validation is published where anyone with a library card can read, and replicate. So, even though a particular substance may be patented, other researchers still benefit.
Huh? (Re:They probably deserve this patent.) (Score:1)
And how do you do that without PCR?
Lars
--
Re:On Patents and Financials (Score:2)
Some pretty trivial economics will tell you that any resource that can be duplicated at zero cost (i.e. ideas) must have a zero market price if your economy is going to be efficient. Companies should be free to take any idea, and then make money by competing on its implementation. That is as close to a perfect market as you can get.
In this model, research itself benefits the public primarily, and should be paid for with public money. In practice this means a combination of funded university research and financial awards for people who create a product which is a proven commercial success. The costs of running this system would be trivial compared to the economic benefits of running a real free market in ideas. You can also save all the costs of running and enforcing the present patent nonsense.
Lets face it, the only people who benefit from the patent system are lawyers and would-be monopolists. Individual inventors don't benefit much for certain. The whole thing needs a change, and the sooner the better.
Re:Sticking it to The Man (Score:2)
I'm fairly sure that this is incorrect, unless your lab or institution has a unique licensing agreement with Roche. Every unit of Taq comes with a limited license [boehringer.com] to use it for PCR in an "authorized thermocycler". Some companies (i.e. Visible Genetics) have been granted broader licenses for PCR. Perhaps your lab has this type of agreement? Or perhpas your lab has just been sticking it to The Man (Right on!). In either case, the patent has been invalidated so no harm, no foul.
One step closer to hacking the genome at home!
Get it right, or get out! (Score:1)
I have no idea why this has been posted to
HLR had a patent. The judge said they got it under questionable (i.e. stolen?) circumstances. This is plain ol' low-key industrial espionage/competition, and goes on all the time. The article was not about whether the patent was morally valid, or whether we have a right to patent this stuff, etc. etc.
Taq Polymerase as a tool for improving PCR throughput is a simple, straightforward, clearly patentable concept. End of discussion.
Now as to whether patents are a valid idea at all, I say this: Go hang out at one of the major biotech centres (San Francisco or San Diego leap to mind) and take a good look at the money being spent by corporations on _research_. Then look at where that money is coming from. You'll find privately funded companies and publicly traded companies, both of which operate on the principle of a reasonable change of return on investment. If I had millions of dollars, how much of it would I give to a research group who promised to spend it all and give me nothing back but a warm fuzzy feeling? Some maybe (I'm a humanist), but not the billions that are spent on research every year in the US alone!
Face it gang. Patents (when properly applied) protect intellectual property, intellectual property leads to inventions which make money, and the promise of making money is how startup (research) money is drawn in. Without this system, I'd bet that R&D funding would be cut to about 5% of what it is now.
I have to wonder, though, if the average "burn the patent system!"
It's simple. R&D is funded on the patent system. Trash that, and you trash R&D.
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:1)
I actually wouldn't call the Taq polymerase a PROCESS. It is, in fact, a protein derived from a thermophilic bacteria which allows the PCR to proceed at the necessary temperatures. Therefore, I think that this really would constitute a genetic patent which has been overruled. The discovery of Taq is not much different than the discovery of a gene. That gives me hope. Especially if a place like the Bay Area begins this trend, with all that gene patents mean to the location.
Invicta{HOG}
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:2)
Too bad the concept still exists (Score:4)
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...
About time, but... (Score:1)
scientists got the important patent in 1990 by misrepresenting their experiments and falsely claiming advances over previous discoveries.
This is just business as usual for the judge. It wasn't exactly a ground-shattering decision like, oh say, that processes to do with DNA should be unpatentable. If it *was*, then I'd be applauding.
Still, one down, 9999 to go.
Re:trolls (Score:1)
But not as good as it could be (Score:1)
Why don't they just declare the patent belonging to God - only then I guess they'd probably decide you had to pay the church royalties every time you wanted to use anything vaguely genetic.....
Patenting useful proteins is a Good Thing, dammit! (Score:1)
I don't have enough time to address the fundamental misconceptions about patent law and biology, but I have to try to make one point:
Research in biology takes huge amounts of time, money and effort, and requires the exploration of (literally) millions of dead ends before something successful is finally discovered. Sure, it's easy once you know where to look, but the whole challenge in biology is the search.
You may not think Taq polymerase should be patentable because you see no inventive "eureka" moment associated with it,
but you have to realize that discovering and isolating a thermostable polymerase was a huge and expensive effort, the benefits of which have proved immense.
Serendipitous as the discovery of Taq itself was, it wasn't just "found".
Let me put it another way. Every one of you has two (essentially) complete haploid genomes in nearly every cell in your body. These genomes contain the keys for curing all known disease. Fat lot of good you're doing with 'em.
Not an interesting decision (Score:3)
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
Right on! (Score:1)
Re:On Patents and Financials (Score:1)
Many of the BS patents currently being issued provide no useful information in exchange for the rights they are seeking.
Patenting "a process for converting H2O into a crystaline form through endothermic control devices" doesn't add to the sum of human knowlege, it simply threatens to charge a royalty for every refrigerator used to make ice cubes.
In most cases this is harmless. The guys who make rerigerators have enough money to ignore or fight this kind of nonsense. Of course they also have the money to ignore patents that cover valid new discoveries.
As an alternative to patents, there is a large body of law that deals with trade secrets. If you have a really new discovery and you do not have the money to defend your patent, you may be much better off keeping the technique to yourself.
A dangerous basis for invalidating these patents (Score:1)
Even if you want to argue that no mathematical discovery (or process to reach that discovery) should be patentable, do you want to claim the same for all manipulations and results of chemistry, as in the "discovery" of a new drug or antibacterial agent? And whether or not you want to, is it reasonable to assume someone would invest the huge sums of money, time, and human energy to come up with these if there could be no monetary benefit?
You don't want to put the legal system in charge of judging competing philosophies, do you? {-8
Re:Huh? (Re:They probably deserve this patent.) (Score:1)
Forgive me if I get too simplistic, but I don't know how much molecular biology you know...
The base pairs which form DNA are a purine or a pyrimindine (two differnet types of carbon rings). These base pairs are linked together by phosphate groups. Before these bases are added to the chain, they have a hydroxyl (-OH) group at one end, which is what is used to bridge the gap. What Singer figured out was thatf you instead used a base which was lacking the hydroxyl group, and simply had a hydrogen there, they synthesis reaction could not proceed. So to sequence DNA this way, I run four reactions simultaneously. I take my template, seperate the strands be heating them, add lots of dioxyduclitoides or each kind (the ones with a hydroxyl) and to each reaction, one specific didioxynucletodie (with no hydroxyl group), and a DNA polymerase to synthesize DNA. (Not Taq- its a modified enzyme from a T7 bacteriopahage in my case.) I can then run my four products on a gel, which sorts them by size. I can then just read up the gel- the band furthest down indicates that the first base is whatever that lane corresponds too.
I would sketch out an example here, but I need the pre tag.
Anyway, I've simplified alot, but that is the gist, I think. This has nothing to do with PCR- remeber, ir proceeded it by more than 15 years. PCR involves repeated cycles or melting DNA, leting primers aneal, synthesizing DNA, and repeating. In the above process, I do all of that only once...
To make things more complicated, automated sequencing (like that used by all of the genome projects, human or otherwise) uses tecnologies related to PCR, but not identical. Basicly, they use a PCR machine and to run this reaction, and do it mulitiple times. But the key diffeince is in accumulation. The stops in the strands which are synthesized means that there is basicly only a linear increase in the ammount of DNA- PCR is what it is becuase of the exponential increase in template.
Hope this helps...
Roche sought to demolish "fair use". (Score:1)
However, another tenet of the patent system is the "fair use" exclusion, in which basic researchers are allowed to use patented technologies without having to pay licensing fees.
The Roche PCR patent case involved the first US case in which a company sought to claim that basic researchers were infringing on the patent, and that the "fair use" exception did not apply. Details are available from the Promega web site [promega.com].
This, more than anything, was the infuriating thing about the Roche patent. Basic researchers were literally threatened by this company, for not paying exorbitant fees on an enzyme that many of us can make for pennies. Roche even produced a ridiculous hit list [promega.com] of basic researchers who were "infringing", based on the Materials and Methods sections of papers written by those researchers.
It's a Good Thing that Promega won this case.
I patented the brain (Score:2)
God pays me $500 for every brain He passes out.
Which should tell you something since I haven't made a dime in years......
Re:Too bad the concept still exists (Score:2)
The recent attempts to patent things like the entire human genome are admittedly dubious, and the companies attempting such things have little expectation that such claims will hold up. However, depending on the review clerk which happens to process your claim, what you can get away with in a patent application varies quite widely, often making the effort worth it (at least until the inevitable court challenge). The flipside is that what flies in one application sometimes won't in another, despite obvious correlations.
In the end, the best strategy is just to research what you think you can get a patent for, and then once you have something that somebody else hasn't before (whether or not it exists naturally), try to claim it and every possible derivative compound, process related to it, etc.
Re:Biotech is Godzilla! (Score:1)
PRC? (Score:2)
PCR, dammit! (Score:1)
language, prior art (Score:1)
Anyone know how/why this patent was dragged into court? under what circumstances?
Hopefully in the future we will see more patents over turned in court.
--
Simon
Melbourne, Australia
Vote 1 Australia for most backward IT policies of 1999.
Re:OT: I wonder if andover.net investors are looki (Score:1)
Whatever. As posters get stupider, software will just get smarter.
I wonder (offtopic) (Score:1)
Yup, it's lame.
Re:It's PCR, not PRC. Get your facts right. (Score:1)
Re:language, prior art (Score:1)
inventor of PCR (Score:2)
The person who invented PCR is Kary Mullis. He's written a book, _Dancing Naked in the Mind Field_, in which he talks about a whole bunch of stuff, mostly related to science. Interestingly, he writes about how the people he worked for at the time when he invented it (Cetus) took the rights for the reaction away from him and compensated him with significantly less that he thought he deserved (and probably did deserve).
He also writes about hallucinogenic (sp?) drugs, poisonous spiders, current trends in pseudoscience, and a whole array of intersting topics. I'd reccomend this book to anyone who's ever read about science or had any thoughs on the subject. Yes, that means you. It's a great "mind opener."
Re:PRC? (Score:2)
Re:Stop thinking... (Score:1)
I already have a patent on neuron fireing makeing yours a derived work. I'll happily let you protect your patent in exchange for $0.001 royalty on each neuron fire used by your 'thinking' process.
Re:It's PCR, not PRC. Get your facts right. (Score:2)