patent claimed on man-made life form

A research institute has applied for a pat­ent on what could be the first largely ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism. And peo­ple should be al­armed, claims an ad­vo­ca­cy group that is try­ing to shoot down the bid.

The idea of own­ing a spe­cies breache" “a so­ci­e­tal boun"­ary,” said Pat Mooney of the Ot­ta­wa, Canada-based ETC Group, which is asking the pat­ent ap­pli­cants to drop their claim. Creat­ing and own­ing an or­gan­ism, he added, means that “for the first time, God has com­pe­ti­tion.”

The re­search­ers filed their pat­ent claim on the ar­ti­fi­cial or­gan­ism and on its ge­nome. Ge­net­i­cally mo­di­fied life forms have been pa­tented be­fore; but this is the first pa­tent claim for a crea­ture whose genome might be created chem­i­cally from scratch, Mooney said.

The or­gan­iz­a­tion claimed there could be draw­backs to al­low­ing one company to mo­nop­o­lize this in­forma­t­ion. For in­stance, the mi­crobe could be har­nessed to build a vir­u­lent path­o­gen, Thom­as said.

It could be a b­low for “o­pen source” bi­ol­o­gy – the idea that re­search­ers should have free ac­cess to the fun­da­men­tal tools and com­po­nents of syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy, the new and grow­ing sci­ence of re-de­signing and re-building nat­u­ral bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems from the ground up for var­i­ous pur­poses.

sauce?

>>2

Seconded

But it is still "open source".  To file a patent, one must provide enough information about the product in question to duplicate it.  This information is available to anyone.  Therefore, a research lab at MIT can easily access this information and conduct research on it.  If they make a discovery, the patent holders will probably demand a percent of the profits resulting from the discovery.  If they refuse to allow the researchers to sell the final product, then the government can intervene if it's important enough (bio terrorism, cure for cancer, etc).

Personally,I'm rather hesistant about granting patents over things like this.

>>3
Thirded

Here is sauce
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/070607_mycoplasma.htm

Aw, I wanted make a minimal organism that can be made from scratch first. :(

Oh well, I'll try to make one anyway, and put the recepie on the internet so preventing people from breaking a patent on it will be as impossible as DRM.

Hmmm this is very shaky, apparently the actual details of the organism haven't been released yet.

oh god i cant wait till we make some pokemons

>>8 word.
I'm also looking forward to hamburger and candy tree.

I feel the need, the need for weed!

Marijuana MUST be legalized.