Patent on virus; is it a good or a bad thing ?
What if the patent is used in order to provided access to the virus genetic information ?
From this article in MyTelus « A firm in Hong Kong is seeking the patent to the entire SARS virus »
Legally speaking I still beleive that no one can have the exclusive right to a strand of DNA that exist in nature. Discovering the undelying structure of a virus or of a human, should not grant a exclusivity in research.
In Canada, the patent system is not as loose as in the United States. Our courts decided that a patent could not be granted on a superior life form. I’m not certain if the jugment would extend to virus, and since the court was split (5-4)in the Harvard Mouse case, this could easely go one way or the other, since I suppose there is less sympathy for a virus than a mouse. I suppose this is why this patent application was sent to the USPTO, since they seem to be allowing patent far easely than in Canada.
I see it’s also on /.
Hey, it’s more serious than Fleecy’s last post !
If the Harvard mouse didn’t fly, I doubt sequencing the genes, without modifying them, would be acceptable, as it is more of a discovery and less of an invention than a genetically engineered being.
But who knows where this will go… Down south, anything under the sun is patentable.
Maybe we’ll hear thinly veiled menaces of probable sanctions due to Canada being a haven for bioterrorists since anyone is free to learn about killer viruses’ genome.
But hey, if it can be patented, I want to try to sing the bases out loud and get a copyright on the recording and then sue anyone who publishes the lyrics…
Now now… Let’s not start saying that the American courts are STILL allowing patents on « anything under the sun that is made by man » as decided in Diamond v. Chakrabarty in the 1980s. (That’s right! I did a paper on this very topic! Ha!) And I would say that although that statement went WAY too far and got used as a « cliché » sentence by too many people, that particular decision was well founded! Human intervention remains an important criteria when it comes to emitting patents for DNA sequences. If the SARS virus (and there is still question on whether it is one or two viruses, or even what the heck is causing SARS anyway!) is found as is in nature, a mere discovery is insufficient (yes, even in US) to get the USPTO to give you any rights on anything! You can patent a new, non-obvious and useful technique of identifying viruses, but that’s a totally different claim. A patent can even be forseeable for « newly isolated or purified materials » if such new forms offer some sort of utility over non-purified ones found in nature.
And a quick little distinction to make between the Harvard mouse and the SARS virus, the mouse was patented under the « nonnaturally occurring nonhuman multicellular living organisms » category. The ability for the researchers to control the outcome of their patented organism seems to play an important role.