Last week, the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) finding claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,064,197 to be invalid for anticipation or obviousness, in Enzo Life Sciences, Inc. v. Becton,...more
The avocado, having gained popularity (at least in the U.S.) as a convenient (and delicious) vehicle for consuming otherwise not particularly healthful corn chips, has more recently been hailed as a "superfood" when consumed...more
The coming of the genomic age has made popular genetic explanations of traits (behavioral as well as structural) in plants, animals, and humans. Because of their importance (economically, historically, and emotionally), dogs...more
Genetic Engineering News published the results of a study on Monday entitled "Top 50 NIH-Funded Institutions of 2019." The report sets forth the context of these expenditures, with the Trump administration proposing large...more
Durum wheat, Triticum turgidum L. ssp. durum (Desf.) Husn., used principally for pasta production, was derived from wild emmer wheat, T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides (Körn. ex Asch. & Graebn.) Thell. from domesticated emmer...more
The portion of the eukaryotic world inhabited by plants exhibits a genetic complexity not shared by members of the animal world (see, for example, "Rose Genome Reveals Its Exquisite Complexities"). The strawberry...more
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today granted U.S. Patent 10,227,611 to Jennifer Doudna, Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the patent entitled "Methods and compositions for RNA-directed...more
The plague, that variety of human ailments caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria, is mythic in human history, a nightmare disease carried by fleas infesting rats, a species that is omnipresent in human civilizations. Its...more
Human evolution, once its occurrence was recognized over a century and a half ago, has long been a source of confusion, concern, and controversy (as well as fascination and wonder). The recent explosion in our understanding...more
Growth is one of the defining properties of being biologically alive, and the biology of growth involves both cellular proliferation and differentiation from stem cells to one or a plurality of differentiated cells making up...more
One of the most powerful, visceral arguments made by the American Civil Liberties Union in Assoc. Molecular Pathol. v. Myriad Genetics, 689 F. 3d 1303 (2013), was that permitting Myriad and the University of Utah to have...more
Ulrich (Uli) Laemmli, an illustrious professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, developer of SDS (sodium dodecyl sulfate)-polyacrylamide electrophoresis (PAGE) for separating proteins, and responsible for identifying...more
The orange clownfish, Amphiprion percula, is an important denizen of many reef systems (and, thanks to Disney, Pixar, and Ellen Degeneris, one of the most famous fishes since the Billy Bass). One of thirty species of...more
The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has been the subject of a controlled breeding experiment in Russia, at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to select for genetic determinants associated with...more
Many people of a certain age will remember their first awareness of the koala coming from a television commercial in the 1960's for an Australian airline ("I hate Qantas"). Thereafter, of course, zoos, like the San Diego Zoo...more
Hiram Bentley Glass and classical geneticists of the Twentieth Century elucidated some of the ways that genetics could inform regarding human populations and their history, using observations like genetic drift (famously,...more
Perhaps somewhat ironically, a group of Chinese researchers* recently published a report on the genome of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), entitled "The genomic and functional landscapes of developmental...more
Increased drug costs have been a political and economic target for more than the past generation, being one of the motivations for the Hatch-Waxman Act in 1984. Drug costs were a big part of Ross Perot's campaign in 1992,...more
The interference between the Broad Institute and the University of California/Berkeley has been in the spotlight over the past year. But there have been other skirmishes between the parties, each of which has recently been...more
The Supreme Court most recently revisited the proper standards for making an obviousness determination ten years ago, in KSR Int'l. Co. v. Teleflex. Inc. While in some ways changing the obviousness standard, for example...more
Human history is often something modern man only sees as through a glass, darkly. This is particularly the case when that history did not occur in the Mediterranean, the Nile Valley, India, or China, or when there is no...more
In the general chaos that has resulted from the Supreme Court's recent forays into trying to delineate the proper standards for patent subject matter eligibility (AMP v. Myriad Genetics, Mayo Collaborative Labs v....more
Detection of paternal cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal blood (the technology at issue in Ariosa v. Sequenom) was in a different incarnation the subject of an interference between professors at two universities; the...more
It has been the experience of more than a few first-year law students taking Civil Procedure I that the only correct answer to a complex procedural problem is that there is no way for a plaintiff to bring suit. The student...more
On April 6th, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continued to loosen the reins on the genetic diagnostic and DNA analysis company 23andMe with regarding to direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing related to...more