iAs I read and re-read In re Roslin, App. No. 2013-1407 (Fed. Cir., May 8, 2014), before going across the street to “testify” at the PTO 101 Forum, I was struck by how the logical pathway chosen by the panel to deny claims to the famous cloned sheep could have gone the other way.
The panel followed the pathway: a) no naturally-occurring organism is patentable, b) Dolly’s DNA donor “parent” was not patentable, c) Dolly was identical to the donor parent in genetic make-up and d) Dolly is patent-ineligible under s. 101, since she exhibited no marked difference from the donor sheep.
This analysis let the panel sidestep the fact that Dolly is “man-made”. An alternative analytic pathway is a) no naturally occurring organism is patentable, b) Dolly is a product of the hand of man and her difference from naturally occurring organisms is her “sameness”, e.g. her very existence is not a natural phenomenon, and c) Dolly meets the requirements of s. 101 and Chakrabarty as a patent-eligible product of human creativity. (I know Dolly is no more – I am just using the present tense for clarity.)
Of course, my alternative analysis was not adopted by the panel, but at least they did not refer to Dolly as a “product of nature” but rather ruled that she was unpatentable subject matter under s. 101. Maybe the Supreme Court will see it my way. It really should grant cert. if only to endorse the “markedly different” dictum in Chakrabarty that is currently the law of the land at both the Fed. Cir. and the PTO.
Another issue that needs resolution is whether or not the effort required to obtain a pure culture of cells (as in Bergy) or a purified natural product as in Parke-Davis is “creative” enough to avoid the curse of Funk Bros. But that’s now a story for another day.
