One common misunderstanding is that pharmaceutical companies patent the plants they collect. While obtaining a patent on a naturally occurring organism as previously known or used is not possible, patents may be taken out on specific chemicals isolated or developed from plants. Often these patents are obtained with a stated and researched use of those chemicals.[citation needed] Generally the existence, structure and synthesis of those compounds is not a part of the indigenous medical knowledge that led researchers to analyze the plant in the first place. As a result, even if the indigenous medical knowledge is taken as prior art, that knowledge does not by itself make the active chemical compound obvious, which is the standard applied under patent law. In the United States, patent law can be used to protect isolated and purified compounds - even, in one instance, a new chemical element (see USP 3,156,523). In 1873, Louis Pasteur patented a yeast which was free from disease (patent #141072). Patents covering biological inventions have been treated similarly. In the 1980 case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the Supreme Court upheld a patent on a bacterium that had been genetically modified to consume petroleum, reasoning that U.S. law permits patents on anything under the sun that is made by man. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has observed that a patent on a gene covers the isolated and purified gene but does not cover the gene as it occurs in nature.[24]
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 02:21:00 +0000
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