Patenting New Forms of Life

Abstract

In the last year or two, some of the biological sciences stepped from a protected adolescence into the chaos and confusion of the adult work world. General Electric succeeded finally in patenting not only the Chakrabarty process for generating an oil eating microorganism, but the product—Pseudomonas aeruginosa—as well.¹ The Cohen-Boyer patent for their process of cleaving and recombining plasmids soon followed, with high expectations of an early patent on products.² These cases focused both academic and investor attention upon the commercial prospects of genetic engineering, now greater than ever, and consequently upon a number of new companies: Genentech, Cetus, and Biogen, to name three in the news. Harvard unsuccessfully proposed to its faculty that the university move beyond its more usual royalty sharing role in new developments to a minority stock share in a company specifically established with outside capital to exploit the patentable biological discoveries of one of its faculty.³ Almost simultaneously, the University of California filed suit to protect its interests in a line of research said to have begun at UCLA and now placed under contract to Genentech by the commercial firm Hoffman LaRoche.⁴ Surrounding these landmark events are changes in law and regulation to make it easier for universities to claim and market patentable ideas produced under federal grants and contracts and to lessen the stringent operating and reporting requirements for laboratories involved in recombinant DNA research.⁵ As more universities, biologists, and businessmen flirt with the opportunities, the scenario will rapidly expand to the point of needing computer techniques to track the issues and the cast of characters.