“The new generations bring with them their new problems which call for new rules, to be patterned, indeed, after the rules of the past, and yet adapted to the needs and justice of another day and hour.” - Benjamin Cardozo, 1925
Roughly twenty years ago, newspaper headlines were packed with stories about Dolly the sheep — the first cloned mammal. More recently, in 2014, In re Roslin[iii] finally laid the patent claims related to Dolly to rest. Although Roslin speaks specifically to cloning technologies, the saga highlights an essential problem in the current judicial approach to patenting life science inventions. We will look first at the history of Roslin and then at its implications for patent law.
“[B]ug, n: An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect. The activity of ‘debugging’, or removing bugs from a program, ends when people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed.”—Datamation
