There is a nice paper by Jacob Moscona called Flowers of Invention analyzing the impacts of USPTO's 1985 Ex Parte Hibberd decision that allowed for seeds to be patentable, in the wake of the Chkrabarty ruling.
He compares crops that were easy to hybridize -- where you could sell hybrid seeds that were difficult to reproduce, and therefore had some built-in protection even before 1985 -- to plants that were hard to hybridize. The paper shows that the 1958 decision spurred innovation in non-hybrid varietes.
I loved this essay!!! Thanks a lot for sharing! There might be a typo in the paragraph: "In March 1979, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals determined that it couldn’t find anything in Flook’s case that impacted the Bergy and Chakrabarty cases and upheld its previous decision that living things were *** patentable. However, to prevent further confusion, the Solicitor General petitioned the Supreme Court for review of the Bergy and Chakrabarty cases once again." ---> at *** a "not" is missing?
Great summary. But a second part would be welcome about the impacts on biological and ecological research. Briefly, a race began to identify these organisms when they get free of the laboratory and experimental fields, "contaminating" natural populations, with unknown long-term consequences. This led to some of the earliest environmental DNA studies done on river and soil samples, and unprecedented pressure on other scientists (field biologists, ecologists, environmental scientists). Concurrently, public university laboratories struggling to finance equipment upgrades to keep up with new biotech methods were essentially turned over to private companies and then literally walled-off (with the first badged access pads) from the rest of the campus. Still today, synbio/ biotech hype continues to draw huge amounts of funding, with almost no public accountability and very little acknowledgement of the necessity to involve ecological and environmental scientists.
Great essay, but seems like an opportunity missed at the end there. Yes, naturally occurring DNA sequences cannot be patented and neither can protein sequences (and so one cannot circumvent a patent by just using different codons), but patents are being granted routinely on non-natural protein sequences if they are sufficiently similar (up to 70% identity!). Again, this is obviously to prevent circumventing the patent by just e.g. making an insignificant point mutation, but on the other hand it may well be that there are natural sequences that are just one point mutation away, thus effectively contradicting the rule of non-patentability of natural sequences.
Now where it really gets interesting is where we are right now: ML algorithms (e.g. ProteinMPNN or here https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.01.600583v1) got so good at learning protein sequences that they can to some extent and probably soon rather easily will be able to redesign protein sequences to have very low identities but identical functions.
Very nice story!
There is a nice paper by Jacob Moscona called Flowers of Invention analyzing the impacts of USPTO's 1985 Ex Parte Hibberd decision that allowed for seeds to be patentable, in the wake of the Chkrabarty ruling.
He compares crops that were easy to hybridize -- where you could sell hybrid seeds that were difficult to reproduce, and therefore had some built-in protection even before 1985 -- to plants that were hard to hybridize. The paper shows that the 1958 decision spurred innovation in non-hybrid varietes.
Link is https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/fi_nov2022_compressed.pdf
I loved this essay!!! Thanks a lot for sharing! There might be a typo in the paragraph: "In March 1979, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals determined that it couldn’t find anything in Flook’s case that impacted the Bergy and Chakrabarty cases and upheld its previous decision that living things were *** patentable. However, to prevent further confusion, the Solicitor General petitioned the Supreme Court for review of the Bergy and Chakrabarty cases once again." ---> at *** a "not" is missing?
Oh my! You're absolutely right. Thanks for letting us know. Just fixed it.
Great summary. But a second part would be welcome about the impacts on biological and ecological research. Briefly, a race began to identify these organisms when they get free of the laboratory and experimental fields, "contaminating" natural populations, with unknown long-term consequences. This led to some of the earliest environmental DNA studies done on river and soil samples, and unprecedented pressure on other scientists (field biologists, ecologists, environmental scientists). Concurrently, public university laboratories struggling to finance equipment upgrades to keep up with new biotech methods were essentially turned over to private companies and then literally walled-off (with the first badged access pads) from the rest of the campus. Still today, synbio/ biotech hype continues to draw huge amounts of funding, with almost no public accountability and very little acknowledgement of the necessity to involve ecological and environmental scientists.
Great essay, but seems like an opportunity missed at the end there. Yes, naturally occurring DNA sequences cannot be patented and neither can protein sequences (and so one cannot circumvent a patent by just using different codons), but patents are being granted routinely on non-natural protein sequences if they are sufficiently similar (up to 70% identity!). Again, this is obviously to prevent circumventing the patent by just e.g. making an insignificant point mutation, but on the other hand it may well be that there are natural sequences that are just one point mutation away, thus effectively contradicting the rule of non-patentability of natural sequences.
Now where it really gets interesting is where we are right now: ML algorithms (e.g. ProteinMPNN or here https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.01.600583v1) got so good at learning protein sequences that they can to some extent and probably soon rather easily will be able to redesign protein sequences to have very low identities but identical functions.
Maybe a topic for a future essay.
great essay and a significant point for the industry of biotechnology in the future
Great history lesson! -- love this because Al Chakrabarty taught my undergraduate Biochemistry lab at University of Illinois back in the day.