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Many GMO studies have financial conflicts of interest


Darnok

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37 minutes ago, James Kerman said:

GMO's are dealing with organisms, that is the distinction.

I understand that farmers have been selectively breeding seed and animals to get the species we have now however no farmer before Monsanto (who is not a farmer but a chemical/bio-science company) developed seeds that will not propagate the next season.

I'm not scared of health effects and I can understand them wanting to make money from improving yield, drought tolerance and disease resistance but their current model makes the world a slave to their products and kills the process that allowed farmers to selectively propagate the very species that sustain humanity today.

Has Monsanto compensated the millions of farmers who got the plants to that level before they messed with it?

Hmmm, well I guess I'm just not familiar with any of the putative effects your listing for GMOs. I'm also not quite sure why "dealing with organisms" would make it different. Biomedical technology and drugs "deal with organisms" and many technologies and procedures can be, have been and legitimately should be copyrighted by their inventors.

Should a University / Industry partner who develops a new procedure for heart transplant be able to "patent the human heart" obviously that is silly. Should they be able to patent the procedure itself? Probably not, as the procedure they developed is probably in large part pre-existing if not "public domain" methods, but perhaps adjusted in order, timing, or intensity/scale. To the extent that some aspect of their procedure depends on a truly innovative aspect of their creation, then perhaps THAT portion should be patentable. Then we come to the mechanical or pharmacological factors that they might have developed as part of this new heart transplant procedure. Same would apply here: if it is widespread or "already publicly common" = no patent if not, patentable.

 It would probably be a better discussion if we had a very specific case study of a "GMO" to refer to.

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25 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

I'm also not quite sure why "dealing with organisms" would make it different. Biomedical technology and drugs "deal with organisms" and many technologies and procedures can be

Probably, the main difference is "dealing" duration.
Medicines/poisons/potions duration is limited (at least by the organism lifespan), while genetical modifications are not.

Edited by kerbiloid
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1 hour ago, Diche Bach said:

Here is a patent for a calcium carbide production technique.

https://www.google.com/patents/US2749219

Calcium carbide is used to make acetylene.

Here is what is used:

Are you saying you think this patent (which is about 50 years old) is illegitimate because the materials used in it are " in nature."

Everything starts from nature, and where you draw the line between it and "legitimate creative work" does not seem obvious to me.

That is an patent for a production technique to make calcium carbide, not calcium carbide itself. 
Granted this get an bit sticky with drugs, who is an patent on an chemical who might well be natural. 
 

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33 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

That is an patent for a production technique to make calcium carbide, not calcium carbide itself. 
Granted this get an bit sticky with drugs, who is an patent on an chemical who might well be natural. 
 

Exactly. Which is what I was talking about with gene patents too.

If you go out in the rainforest and find a new flower, you can't patent it. That is a natural discovery, not a human invention. But if you come up with a process for cutting out one gene from that flower and putting it into a potato, you can patent the process in such a way as to essentially patent the gene itself. And that's the bit that is problematic, because you are effectively taking something that you discovered in the wild (a gene) and getting a patent on it.

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Probably the worst misuse of "patent" idea is that they patent something as entities, while indeed they patent relations.

For example, this carbide technique is just a description of chemical reactions under certain conditions which objectively exists, nevermind whether somebody "opened" it, "invented" or so. 
As also everything which can be "invented", "written", "painted", etc. Any random composition of pixels or strokes can be patented then, including a pattern of rain drops.

While any patent is just a contract between members of a socium declaring that others cannot use something, previously described by somebody.
So, there by definition cannot be an objectively true way to define "right" and "wrong" in patents bog, there can be only "appropriate for majority of interested in".

Compare this to "private property".
"Owning" something is just a contract between members of socium not to manage something which is already "owned" by another member.
If you wake up on an uninhabited island, unexisting on maps, whom should you ask whether you can take a banana? And why should anybody on another side of the island ask you? That will be a question of contract you both should negotiate.

Edited by kerbiloid
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9 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Ah yes, "Roundup Ready".

  1. Yes, let's make some genes that resist a common herbicide. Because those genes would never spread to the weeds we are trying to fight, right?

After all, it's not like this sort of thing has happened in nature a billion times before, where an organism evolves to resist a poison to gain a competitive advantage, right? Anybody with the slightest understanding of the issue would have expected this to happen sooner or later. There might be a few compounds which are difficult to impossible to generate a resistance to, but those are generally virulently toxic to everything, and so are a no-go for use as an herbicide.

9 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Yeah, it makes things easier for the farmers. But is it good for the rest of us? Man, I love being a lab rat in a long-term toxicity study -- said no one ever.

Ergo, I'm sure you hate eating anything that's ever been sprayed with an herbicide, fungicide, pesticide, etc. The dose makes the poison, and glyphosate (Roundup) targets an enzymatic pathway completely absent in humans. Glyphosate will be one of the best herbicides we've ever produced, and it's a shame that weeds have evolved resistance to it; it'll be hard to find another herbicide that has similarly low toxicity to humans.

6 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Exactly. Which is what I was talking about with gene patents too.

If you go out in the rainforest and find a new flower, you can't patent it. That is a natural discovery, not a human invention. But if you come up with a process for cutting out one gene from that flower and putting it into a potato, you can patent the process in such a way as to essentially patent the gene itself. And that's the bit that is problematic, because you are effectively taking something that you discovered in the wild (a gene) and getting a patent on it.

You are getting a temporary patent on the use of a gene for a specific purpose: i.e. improving a crop. I have no qualms about this, as it is expensive to generate a transgenic crop, and exorbitantly expensive to get it approved, requiring endless rounds of testing to check for unintended side effects. If there's no way to secure a temporary monopoly on these crops, that will just about kill the further generation of transgenic crops.

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

For example, this carbide technique is just a description of chemical reactions under certain conditions which objectively exists, nevermind whether somebody "opened" it, "invented" or so. 
As also everything which can be "invented", "written", "painted", etc. Any random composition of pixels or strokes can be patented then, including a pattern of rain drops.

That is, as point of fact, blatantly false. Patents require:

#1: That it be non-obvious to those practiced in the art

#2: It must be novel

#3: It must be useful

#4: It must be of patentable subject matter (i.e. not patenting the Sun)

Now, there are other forms of intellectual property such as copyright, but patents have a fairly limited domain and lifespan, being restricted to 20 years for something that is actually an invention of a process or device.

Edited by Starman4308
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12 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

You are getting a temporary patent on the use of a gene for a specific purpose: i.e. improving a crop. I have no qualms about this, as it is expensive to generate a transgenic crop, and exorbitantly expensive to get it approved, requiring endless rounds of testing to check for unintended side effects. If there's no way to secure a temporary monopoly on these crops, that will just about kill the further generation of transgenic crops.

That is, as point of fact, blatantly false. Patents require:

#1: That it be non-obvious to those practiced in the art

#2: It must be novel

#3: It must be useful

#4: It must be of patentable subject matter (i.e. not patenting the Sun)

Now, there are other forms of intellectual property such as copyright, but patents have a fairly limited domain and lifespan, being restricted to 20 years for something that is actually an invention of a process or device.

This, now you can say that patents are given to easy like the infamous rectangular phone with rounded corners. 
In software it has been lots of cases where its not novel, pretty easy to find prior examples for the most infamous. 
On the other hand the patent office can not know everything, probably easier to just make it easier to cancel patents because of prior art. 

The Non obvious can be pretty obvious as in why has nobody thought of this before, like an fuel pump handle who had an space for a add on top. 
 

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31 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

This, now you can say that patents are given to easy like the infamous rectangular phone with rounded corners. 
In software it has been lots of cases where its not novel, pretty easy to find prior examples for the most infamous. 
On the other hand the patent office can not know everything, probably easier to just make it easier to cancel patents because of prior art. 

The Non obvious can be pretty obvious as in why has nobody thought of this before, like an fuel pump handle who had an space for a add on top. 
 

Cherry-picking a handful of egregious cases does not a point prove; with the number of patent applications received (and high-power lawyers involved), there are going to be some absurd decisions.

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2 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

That is, as point of fact, blatantly false. Patents require:

#1: That it be non-obvious to those practiced in the art

#2: It must be novel

#3: It must be useful

#4: It must be of patentable subject matter (i.e. not patenting the Sun)

Now, there are other forms of intellectual property such as copyright, but patents have a fairly limited domain and lifespan, being restricted to 20 years for something that is actually an invention of a process or device.

Excellent!

You just have listed significant conditions under which members of your socium agree to accept somebody's right to be a preferable "owner" of an objectively existing piece of the Universe - to avoid chaos and rampage between pretenders.

(Patent itself is just a piece of paper scripting their agreement).

Edited by kerbiloid
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22 hours ago, stellargeli said:

Copyright is for media.  DNA is patented.  Totally different thing.

If you can publish the text string of DNA, you can copyright it (I've linked to a paper describing such in another thread [I think it was behind a paywall, but the title was sufficient evidence for the concept], but it seems to have been a "joke paper").  There aren't any "copyright examiners" like there are "patent examiners",  so you automatically get your copyright [and like a patent it is pretty much just a ticket to a legal case (at least for DNA)].  As far as I know, nobody has taken "copyrighted DNA" to court for any decision either way.

But since copyright is cheap and eternal, I'd assume that every DNA patent (accepted or denied) already has a copyright.  One other argument is that copyright protects somebody from mindlessly or deliberately copying the exact sequence of the genes.  Patents prevent anyone from independently re-creating the mechanism as well (something copyrights don't protect, but proving influence can be tricky).

Hasn't the original "roundup ready" patent expired?  I think that generic stuff exists: as such we might see soon if genes can be copyrighted.

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1 hour ago, wumpus said:

If you can publish the text string of DNA, you can copyright it (I've linked to a paper describing such in another thread [I think it was behind a paywall, but the title was sufficient evidence for the concept], but it seems to have been a "joke paper").  There aren't any "copyright examiners" like there are "patent examiners",  so you automatically get your copyright [and like a patent it is pretty much just a ticket to a legal case (at least for DNA)].  As far as I know, nobody has taken "copyrighted DNA" to court for any decision either way.

But since copyright is cheap and eternal, I'd assume that every DNA patent (accepted or denied) already has a copyright.  One other argument is that copyright protects somebody from mindlessly or deliberately copying the exact sequence of the genes.  Patents prevent anyone from independently re-creating the mechanism as well (something copyrights don't protect, but proving influence can be tricky).

What I've seen indicates that while natural sequences are unpatentable and uncopyrightable, synthetic constructs are patentable and copyrightable. My best guess is that current transgenics, there is a copyright on the DNA construct incorporating the gene, but not the gene itself*, and there is a patent on inserting the gene into organism X for some purpose, but there is no patent on the gene itself. Those bets would be off for a wholly synthetic construct, but designing gene products de novo is still relatively difficult these days.

*Unless you made modifications to the gene, e.g. to improve expression in the new host, but that would only apply to the modified transgene, not the original, from-nature gene. Also, there would be nothing forbidding you from creating a new DNA construct incorporating the original gene or a different modification thereof, but you still couldn't put it into crops and sell it until the patent expired.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Excellent!

You just have listed significant conditions under which members of your socium agree to accept somebody's right to be a preferable "owner" of an objectively existing piece of the Universe - to avoid chaos and rampage between pretenders.

(Patent itself is just a piece of paper scripting their agreement).

So long as you continue to benefit from human society, you get to play by human society's rules.

Good luck being somewhere where you absolutely do not benefit in the slightest; even international waters, there is still an expectation of assistance to SOS calls. You don't like society's rules? Get on a spaceship and cut off communication with Earth.

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I don't think copyright is "eternal." Very long lasting yes, but Shakespeare's estate is no longer making anything from his work.

In fact: no, copyright expires eventually: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html


How long does a copyright last?

The term of copyright for a particular work depends on several factors, including whether it has been published, and, if so, the date of first publication. As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors. To determine the length of copyright protection for a particular work, consult chapter 3 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the United States Code). More information on the term of copyright can be found in Circular 15a, Duration of Copyright, and Circular 1, Copyright Basics.

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11 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

So long as you continue to benefit from human society, you get to play by human society's rules.

Good luck being somewhere where you absolutely do not benefit in the slightest; even international waters, there is still an expectation of assistance to SOS calls. You don't like society's rules? Get on a spaceship and cut off communication with Earth.

Patent rules appeared maybe about 200 years ago. Human history lasts 200 000.

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1 minute ago, Starman4308 said:

Oh, hey, looks like modern societal constructs helped wipe that one out. Funny how that goes.

Strange that you are refusing an idea of social contracts.
Maybe you can see a Universe's label with an owner's name on a chair you're sitting on?
Or you just count it "yours" because the society you live in, regulates things management with so-called "ownership", i.e. just a sequence of different people priorities to manage the thing?

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6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Maybe you can see a Universe's label with an owner's name on a chair you're sitting on?

No, but I can go to the police if it's stolen!

The solilipistic "it's all just a construct, maaaaaaan" philosophy you seem to be espousing has a significant flaw in that it doesn't really permit much for the collective efforts that have so improved the state of mankind. Simply because something is artificial does not mean it is without worth or merit.

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28 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

I don't think copyright is "eternal." Very long lasting yes, but Shakespeare's estate is no longer making anything from his work.

In fact: no, copyright expires eventually: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

Gets bumped up every time Steamboat Willie is about to enter the public domain. It's finite but ever increasing, effectively eternal.

(Off topic: Retroactive copyright term extensions are nonsense)

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1 minute ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Gets bumped up every time Steamboat Willie is about to enter the public domain. It's finite but ever increasing, effectively eternal.

(Off topic: Retroactive copyright term extensions are nonsense)

So, they'll bump it up in 2024?

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6 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

No, but I can go to the police if it's stolen!

This!
If somebody violates the management priority sequence taking your things not in his turn, you appeal to the social mechanism which prevents this disorder and restores the contracted sequence.
If there were no police (say, you are on a desert island), you would discuss the priority sequence with violators directly, and almost surely lose.

Another case. You're the only Earth survivor. You can violate patents at you wish, just because you're the only item in queue.

Edited by kerbiloid
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All this discussion probably calls that everyone have an at least baseline understanding of what a "gene" really is, or if such a thing exists pervasively enough that it is useful for the conceptual purpose it is intended to explain 'inhertance.' As far as I could tell when I last did any scholarship in that area, even geneticists are not always sure, and certainly "scientists" who toss around the word don't have a clue. Lay people are more or less completely in the dark.

Just as a few appetizers: what about SNPS (a topic which serves as a good entrance to the myriad of "complications" that actually exist in how genotypes influence ontogeny)?

Quote

Single-nucleotide polymorphisms may fall within coding sequences of genes, non-coding regions of genes, or in the intergenic regions (regions between genes). SNPs within a coding sequence do not necessarily change the amino acid sequence of the protein that is produced, due to degeneracy of the genetic code.

SNPs in the coding region are of two types, synonymous and nonsynonymous SNPs. Synonymous SNPs do not affect the protein sequence while nonsynonymous SNPs change the amino acid sequence of protein. The nonsynonymous SNPs are of two types: missense and nonsense.

SNPs that are not in protein-coding regions may still affect gene splicing, transcription factor binding, messenger RNA degradation, or the sequence of non-coding RNA. Gene expression affected by this type of SNP is referred to as an eSNP (expression SNP) and may be upstream or downstream from the gene.

If we have some geneticists here, people who spend ~40 hours per week studying, doing research, publishing on this stuff, the maybe they can catch us up. I realized years ago that: without going full scale professional there was not much point in trying to do more than glance over at this field to see what was up from time to time; and even LESS point in trying to keep straight whatever is going on that fits under the term "epigenesis" which is what is really important to actual phenotypic diversity.

Biology does not conform to humanities desire to put it into neat pigeon holes, but that doesn't mean we as a species cannot benefit from manipulating it

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3 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

If we have some geneticists here, people who spend ~40 hours per week studying, doing research, publishing on this stuff, the maybe they can catch us up. I realized years ago that: without going full scale professional there was not much point in trying to do more than glance over at this field to see what was up from time to time; and even LESS point in trying to keep straight whatever is going on that fits under the term "epigenesis" which is what is really important to actual phenotypic diversity.

As a biochemist, I can take a stab at the question "What constitutes a gene?"

My answer:

"Good question. Come back to me when nature stops breaking its own rules."

In general, it would refer to a functional section of DNA found in approximately the same location across individuals of the same species, but things like copy number variation, psuedogenes (whose definition these days is largely "what your annotation program annotates as a pseudogene"), and other infuriating bits of biology make it hard to exactly pin down what a gene is.

Also, you're probably referring to epigenetics, or the field of "what is inherited that isn't a DNA sequence", which includes mitochondria, maternal or paternal DNA marks such as methylation, histone modifications, and a thousand other things that cause biologists to throw up their hands and curse nature for being so weird.

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Thank you Starman4308. Psychobiological anthropologist and even though my students loved it, I think I intimidated a few of the senior faculty because I tried to do some justice to modern genetics, i.e., not merely teach Mendel and Hardy-Weinberg as if that is all there is to it. Good to hear my take that it is "more complicated than 'we' can make sense of right now" confirmed.

ADDIT: 

Quote

and a thousand other things that cause biologists to throw up their hands and curse nature for being so weird.

Maternal licking of mice pups for example?

Edited by Diche Bach
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5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

This, now you can say that patents are given to easy like the infamous rectangular phone with rounded corners. 
In software it has been lots of cases where its not novel, pretty easy to find prior examples for the most infamous. 
On the other hand the patent office can not know everything, probably easier to just make it easier to cancel patents because of prior art. 

The Non obvious can be pretty obvious as in why has nobody thought of this before, like an fuel pump handle who had an space for a add on top. 
 

Not aiming this at you @magnemoe because you're right - this is an infamous case but it's also a terrible example of a bad patent. The 'rounded rectangle' patent (if I remember rightly) was a design patent and not a utility patent. Understandably, that distinction doesn't usually come across very well (or at all) in general conversation, hence the confusion.

Utility patents are the kind of things we're discussing in this thread when we're talking about gene patents. Design patents are much more limited and only cover the three-dimensional shape and (I think) surface decoration of an article. The 'rounded rectangle' patent wasn't a general patent covering 'all phones with non-pointy corners', it was a patent for 'all phones with non-pointy corners that also look like a particular model of iPhone.'

I'm not well versed in design patents but the European equivalent is a registered design right and (amongst other things) those need to be distinctive when compared to the so-called 'design corpus' that is, existing designs for other similar articles. You also need to consider the overall effect of the design - its not enough to do a point by point comparison of two designs and base your arguments on that.

12 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Exactly. Which is what I was talking about with gene patents too.

If you go out in the rainforest and find a new flower, you can't patent it. That is a natural discovery, not a human invention. But if you come up with a process for cutting out one gene from that flower and putting it into a potato, you can patent the process in such a way as to essentially patent the gene itself. And that's the bit that is problematic, because you are effectively taking something that you discovered in the wild (a gene) and getting a patent on it.

I don't want to get too definitive here because a) I'm not a patent attorney and b) I have no idea of your background and for all I know you might be one! With that said, I do work in IP for a living and I'm struggling to think how your example would work. Assuming for the sake of argument that any of these are also novel and inventive then I could imagine claims to:

  • A process for extracting flower DNA.
  • A method of engineering flower DNA into a potato (not as flippant as it might sound - transfecting plant cells is still relatively difficult compared to other kinds of cell)
  • A modified flower gene such that it's adapted for expression in a potato cell 
  • A potato plant having a flower transgene (leaving the door open for anybody to use that flower gene in other plants)

But I'm honestly not sure if you could obtain a patent for the gene itself rather than specific uses of that gene or ancillary processes for manipulating it.

Edited by KSK
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50 minutes ago, KSK said:

Not aiming this at you @magnemoe because you're right - this is an infamous case but it's also a terrible example of a bad patent. The 'rounded rectangle' patent (if I remember rightly) was a design patent and not a utility patent. Understandably, that distinction doesn't usually come across very well (or at all) in general conversation, hence the confusion.

Utility patents are the kind of things we're discussing in this thread when we're talking about gene patents. Design patents are much more limited and only cover the three-dimensional shape and (I think) surface decoration of an article. The 'rounded rectangle' patent wasn't a general patent covering 'all phones with non-pointy corners', it was a patent for 'all phones with non-pointy corners that also look like a particular model of iPhone.'

I'm not well versed in design patents but the European equivalent is a registered design right and (amongst other things) those need to be distinctive when compared to the so-called 'design corpus' that is, existing designs for other similar articles. You also need to consider the overall effect of the design - its not enough to do a point by point comparison of two designs and base your arguments on that.

Thank, I have not heard of design patents, and none has pointed it out then discuses on technical sites. 
And yes Europe has registered design rights who I believe work much the same way. 
Copy products are an issue but then mostly cheap knockouts who try to look like expensive stuff mostly so it look like the buyer has the luxury product. 

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