Alex Reid

Ah hah! So, the Ottawa Sun has uncovered the fact that Agent Orange was used in New Brunswick. Agent Orange used in New Brunswick

I had a friend, Jessie, from PEI who used to tell me his grandfather was the inventor of Agent Orange. Since I can’t remember Jessie’s last name, or his mother’s maiden name, I searched for the inventor’s name online. I didn’t find it, but I did find this interesting bio on Ananda Chakrabarty.

He developed pseudomonas bacterium which can be used to break down environmental spoils such as Agent Orange and Crude Oil. The bacteria literally eats away at the oil and creates safe aquatic food. I found this guy especially interesting because apparently his work prompted the “1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision that forms of life created in the laboratory can be patented.

In “Diamond vs. Chakrabarty,” the US Supreme Court held five to four that living, manmade microorganisms are patentable. The court ruled that patents could be issued for “anything under the sun that is made by man.” In upholding Chakrabarty’s position, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “The relevant distinction is not between living and inanimate things,” but rather between naturally existing and human-made inventions. Because Chakrabarty’s bacterium was created in a laboratory through cross breeding, it was not “nature’s handiwork,” the court said, but the product of “human ingenuity and research.”

Then I found this hippie-looking background website Patentability of Human Genes which says that “July 2000, there were 1,000 patents issued for human genes“. But it clarifies that much of the 1,000 patents likely are of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) which is merely a piece of the puzzle and not the whole puzzle.

What is an EST? An EST is a fragment of a gene obtained through sequencing. Generally very little is known about the EST at the time of its sequencing, other than its source. As of the end of 2000, under the federal Patent Act, Section 112 [35 U.S.C. 112], EST holders may not claim the entire gene from which the EST was sequenced. The sequencing of an EST simply does not provide enough information about the entire gene to be patentable. And this website goes on to state that the EST must be “an invention must be novel, nonobvious, and have utility” to be patented. (more info at Gearing up for patents by Manisha Shridhar

Sure, these are the rules set out by the US. But this has an impact on Canadians as well, as the Canadian government is considering amending several of its patent rules regarding medical assistance to Africa to curtailing P2P file sharing.

I’m just trying to wrap my mind around this all, and shall deliver more background info when I can. In the meantime, it’s food for thought