daughart

21 ms·

211.
by daughart 13y ago
It's funny how often people are happy to pay for something, but when you offer them something for free suddenly they want more. Overland Park should have taken a good deal when it was offered, but they got greedy, they wanted protectio
212.
by daughart 13y ago
I see what you're saying, but I personally use LaTeX for fine control of layout; I've spent a while writing a bunch of custom style docs that are tweaked out to my exact specification. It seems like this is what the author is tryi
213.
by daughart 13y ago
If I found myself going through all this work to set up applescripts and whatnot, I would just use LaTeX. It's the correct tool for people that want complete control over their document formatting. I actually like iWork 5 MORE now, pre
214.
by daughart 13y ago
It seems like Apple has been clear about the security of your fingerprint on your iPhone. Could the NSA be hacking your phone and retrieving this information? Nothing is impossible, but probably not if Apple has done what they describe. A l
215.
by daughart 13y ago
Why do you think this wouldn't be accepted? I know in my field of biology if a person were to disprove an existing theory it would be an important work. My colleague was just scooped in Science on work that disproves the ribosome spaci
216.
by daughart 13y ago
People can't draw swastikas anymore without invoking political and cultural symbolism. Sometimes groups appropriate symbols in ways that render them cultural signifiers. Seems like a somewhat trivial comment on such an important civil
217.
by daughart 13y ago
Without comment on the ethics of his actions, is it at all surprising that such an egotistical and narcissistic person would overstate things about themselves?
218.
by daughart 13y ago
I think this looks nice - looking forward to seeing this in iOS7. It's a small bit of visual candy that will hopefully add usability by replacing the dimensionality lost to removing drop shadows.
219.
by daughart 13y ago
Do people benefit from LinkedIn? I know I have been pulling back for a while in terms of the amount of information I share about myself on the internet. I have seen that I don't really benefit from giving Facebook my data - even in ter
220.
by daughart 13y ago
Your perspective is confusing. You say that a modified form of thiostrepton should not be patentable, even though the patent protects the molecule as well as the process of chemical synthesis or purification, which often requires significan
221.
by daughart 13y ago
At least I have provided clear arguments. You have continued to make assertions (such as pharma being corrupted with respect to patents) without any kind of proof or even a clear argument as to why this is the case. I suggest you consider n
222.
by daughart 13y ago
This petition has less of a chance than the one about building a death star.
223.
by daughart 13y ago
It seems clear to me that such a confusing and scientifically-confused decision will not last long. Hopefully this decision paves the way for a more reasonable standard in a few years. Meaningful modification should be the standard. Removin
224.
by daughart 13y ago
Unjustified fear is not a rational basis for policy. It's not the synthesis method that is at stake here, it is the engineered biological system itself (system referring to a gene, regulatory sequence, genetic pathway, or organism). Th
225.
by daughart 13y ago
That should be trivial, if you had a large sample and money for sequencing. The consensus in the listservs I'm on is that cDNA patentability will fall next because of these and other inconsistencies (cDNA existing in nature, being a no
226.
by daughart 13y ago
Yes, sorry I meant patentable. This ruling specifically says that merely identifying the location of a gene and isolating it is not a patentable transformation. PCR is not transformative because the dsDNA molecule exists in nature. I think
227.
by daughart 13y ago
I genuinely don't understand your point. If a group of people synthesize and test many synthetic DNA sequences and then patent the useful ones, that seems fine to me. You might even call them "synthetic biologists". They have
228.
by daughart 13y ago
As 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 un
229.
by daughart 13y ago
I suspect you are a troll, but I will respond anyway... Sequence space is very large. There are only a total of 8 million US patents. There are 16 million 12-base-pair nucleotide sequences. To patent the sequence space of a functional produ
230.
by daughart 13y ago
PCR is not covered by the patent, only reverse transcription of the processed RNA molecule to cDNA. There are many flavors of genomic PCR that are fine under this interpretation, including a rapid SNP-detecting digital qPCR.
231.
by daughart 13y ago
Isn't the standard here whether or not these molecules exist in nature? Honest question.
232.
by daughart 13y ago
A quick Google search for "patented disease alleles" suggests Crohn's disease, some forms of kidney disease, diabetes, and many more!
233.
by daughart 13y ago
"In Chakrabarty, scientists added four plasmids to a bacte- rium, which enabled it to break down various components of crude oil. 447 U. S., at 305, and n. 1. The Court held that the modified bacterium was patentable." Diamond v.
234.
by daughart 13y ago
Seems like the key element is modification (such as removal of exons). The court specifically referred to patenting modified bacteria.
235.
by daughart 13y ago
> If they isolate a gene that makes a person immune to a specific desease then found a way to package and distribute that gene, could they patent it? Aspirin became newly protected because of a distribution method Bayer invented, so yes,
236.
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.
237.
by daughart 13y ago
It absolutely should mean this. Maybe 23andme can be something more than a toy.
238.
by daughart 13y ago
I believe you are correct here.
239.
by daughart 13y ago
This decision affirms a previous decision that synthetic modifications to DNA sequences are patented - regardless of whether they have introns. You see, the ruling suggests that the act of creating a new synthetic, modified DNA molecule (in
240.
by daughart 13y ago
This sets the stage for a simple way to overturn any cDNA patent. Somewhere in the body of any person infected with a retrovirus such as HIV exists a completely natural molecule of BRCA1 cDNA.

More ›