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What I'm referring to is not only synthesis (artificially generating), but design and engineering. This is substantively different than natural products, in tha
by daughart 13y ago
What I'm referring to is not only synthesis (artificially generating), but design and engineering. This is substantively different than natural products, in that they are truly invented.
- ryusage 13y agoThe problem I have with it is that, in all cases, any synthetic DNA could exist in nature. We can't even verify with 100% certainty that any given sequence doesn't already exist in nature. If it doesn't exist already, it could in the future, naturally, through evolution.
- daughart 13y agoAs I pointed out to shmerl above, sequence space is very large, and in general sparsely populated. A functional gene product and regulatory sequence is often thousands of base pairs. 4^1000 = 10^600. There are only 10^80 molecules in the universe. So if you have done truly de novo design, you can be pretty sure it doesn't exist somewhere else by random chance. That being said, I think that even if you take a natural gene and modify it meaningfully - that should be patent-able. For instance, if you take an enzyme and engineer a version that doesn't degrade as readily, or has much better activity, that should be patent-able, don't you think? EDIT: There's a good deal of prior art regarding numbers. As for patenting molecules, we allow that all the time... drugs, compounds, etc. Because they are discovered as I describe above.
- shmerl 13y agoAgain, getting into arguments of making molecules patentable because there are so many combinations available is bizarre. Why not make numbers patentable as well - there is an infinite amount of them.