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Your argument doesn't work either, because in that case you could patent the invention of a battery consisting of metal strips and lemons. Lemons would still b

• CWuestefeld 18y ago
  Maybe my analogy was poor, because I think that your final paragraph meshes well with the idea I mention in my last paragraph -- I don't think we're actually disagreeing. That is, the use of BRCA1 for a particular cancer treatment could be patented. But BRCA1 itself is (under my proposal) still fair game, both on its own as well as in other treatments that differ sufficiently from the patented one. As you say, lemons should always be fair game. I can patent its combination with metal strips as a battery; that still leaves you free to patent an alternate use, e.g., as a cleaning agent. What I was trying (poorly, it would seem) to get at was that the fact that we can observe an example of a mechanism or process in nature should not make something unpatentable. Seeing a stick balanced across a stone might give a caveman the idea for inventing the lever; the fact that nature prompted that invention doesn't invalidate it, I don't thing (although there might be questions about obviousness).