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Law and Society

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Patents and Biotechnology

The patent system: supposed to promote scientific progress and technological development by providing incentives for inventors, investors, and entrepreneurs.

The government grants inventors a private right, i.e. ownership of the invention for 20* years, in exchange for a public good, i.e. their disclosure of information about their invention in the patent application.

In theory, granting inventors a limited monopoly on their inventions provides them with an attractive alternative to trade secrecy and encourages the dissemination of scientific and technical information.

*less for certain kinds of patents (e.g. new drugs)

Bio-tech Terminology

DNA is a double-stranded helix composed of complementary nucleic acid base-pairs: adenine (A) pairs with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) pairs with guanine (G). DNA consists of sequences of nucleic acids, such as ACTTAGGAC. Proteins are composed of amino acids, which can fold to make complex structures (various tissues which form organs ,etc).… It takes three nucleic acid bases (or codon) to code for a single amino acid.

A “gene” can be defined as the basic unit of heredity; it carries the information required to make one or more proteins. In human beings, genes include the base-pairs required to make a protein but not the regulatory sequences. Only a small percentage of human DNA, perhaps less than 5%, consists of genes. The human genome includes about 35,000 genes, which code for about 100,000 proteins. The rest of the genome consists of regulatory sequences as well as other DNA base-pairs that have no apparent function, which are also known as “junk DNA.”

The USPTO regards DNA sequences as chemicals similar to other isolated and purified compounds, such as digitalis (a heart medication found in the foxglove plant), salicylic acid (an anti-inflammatory medication

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