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Patents Science

Dolly Cloning Method Patented 67

Posted by Hemos from the deserved-patents dept.
Cy Guy writes "The BBC is reporting that Roslin Institute, along with two government agencies that helped fund the research, has been awarded a UK patent for the technology used to produce a clone of Dolly the Sheep in 1996. Roslin has already been sold an exclusive license for the technology to the U.S. company Geron for $45M. "
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Dolly Cloning Method Patented More

Dolly Cloning Method Patented

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  • Give me ONE good reason for any patent (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can somebody give any good reason in defense of the patent system?

    Let's talk about typical excuses for keeping the patent.

    Excuse (1) : It rewards the innovators and thus encourages innovation.

    Answer:

    Scientific discoveries have been done and will be done without any
    patent system. Patenting slows down freedom of utilzing the fruits
    those discoveries.

    Innovation and inventions like TCP/IP, WWW, HTML, XML would have been
    far less successful they were patented. Internet as we know today
    would not have existed and there would have been BBSes operated by AOL
    and Microsoft.

    So, the patent system serves the purpose of creating new monopolies or
    entrenching the current ones. Patents just raise barriers to entry for
    new smaller innovative players to the market. That's why established
    big market players love the patent system and they patent everything
    that comes to mind. Patents are used as tools to reduce competition
    and thus hinders innovation.


    Excuse (2) : The inventors need to eat too and recoup the cost.

    Answer:

    Then let the inventor keep his/her technology a trade secret. If that
    technology is really that non-obvious, then he would get a significant
    headstart in the market before the competitors can reverse-engineer it
    or come up with their own competitive invention. Keep/make
    reverse-engineering legal but keep stealing trade-secret illegal.


  • Cloning (Score:1)

    by Frodo ( 1221 )
    So, *that's* and answer about if we'd have human cloning, etc. - just patent it and nobody will come close to it for 20 years. Ancient ethics' problems solved with ancient legal system - isn't it ironic?
  • Another question rises - there are mentioned governmental agenices. Those are usually funded with state's (i.e., people's) money, not? And then they go and patent the thing which was the product of their research, and take all the money to itselves? Am I misunderstanding something or this is somehow strange?
  • Does this mean no more cheap lamb chops?

    This is a genuinely innovative, non-obvious process, AFAICT, which means I think it's fair for them to patent it. But, if a mad scientist were to use the process to clone themselves, which one would they sue?

  • I seem to remember that the idea of consumer-level biotech and it's associated patentability, profitability, and inherent potential for disaster is perhaps the most significant theme in the Micheal Chriton book, Jurassic Park.

    Biotech companies fall in and out of existence with incredible rapidity these days. Imagine the potential wealth that could be had if a particular biotech company was able to patent the process of growing a living and breathing Wooly Mammoth, an event that has a real potential of happening.

    And how long before somebody figures out that kids would simply love a picacho(sp?) that was a real living and breathing animal. Biotech has the capacity to give us wonderful medical advancements, but I think it's a dangerous tool to be put in the hands of the impulse driven public.

    It was funny when the Flinstones used animals as tools ... I wonder if it will still be humorous when we start to.

  • Okay, that's cool, but you still need to license the use of air with the plant kingdom. I've found that air is an invaluable resource and since they have exclusive control over it, you're going to either need to start cloning oak trees or pay them large sums of carbon dioxide for the privelege. Keep in mind that cutting them down (perhaps as a form of legal revenge?) doesn't go over well - your air supply may be cut off a few years later.. and, well.. we all know what that does to your long-term survival options.
  • Keep in mind, kids, that hatching lawyers isn't covered by this patent. You can still grow them, feed them with red tape, and finally put them into your fish tank and watch them duel for the all important "injunction". That goodness for that - I'd be real bummed if I couldn't grow my own lawyers. =)

  • This one seeme reasonable (Score:4)

    by SimonK ( 7722 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:13AM (#1354870)
    Although I'm not a big fan of patents in general, I have to say that this one seems reasonable. It certainly meets the criterea of novelty and usefulness that seem to be lacking in so many software patents.
  • It could be argued that it is the construction of a particular type of machine - a biological machine. Just because the parts are made of cells doesn't mean that this is no less a mechanism.

    It could be argued in Philosophy 101, but not in a patent infringrement lawsuit. The patent is on a process, not a physical construction.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Actually, this doesn't set a precedent - it follows one. That is to say: procedures are patented all the time. In biotech this is normal. It's normal in other areas as well. I think it's reasonable too, because many times the method IS the science.
  • This is business as usual for science. Methods and procedures are patented all the time. This is reasonable because many times, the procedure IS the science. Sometimes the real achievement isn't the product (after all, we already had sheep) it's the way you made the product. This is very true in biotechnology; alot of the research going on is simply to find methods that actually work. What we'll eventually do with all those biotech methods isn't even known yet.

  • Well deserved. (Score:3)

    by um... Lucas ( 13147 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:17AM (#1354874) Journal
    I hope no one comes along today and starts complaining about patents in this thread. Yes, some patents appear to be bogus (one-click shopping springs to mind) but this is a well deserved patent, in my eyes. After all, if cloning were a simple feat that didn't require years of research and millions of dollars in funding, then we'd have seen cloned sheep years ago, and cloned dinosaurs would be much closer to reality than they are today (which is pretty distant).

  • Isn't there some sort of unwritten rule that says academic and government institutions work for the benefit of the scientific community, not in an attempt to gather revenue?


    Tell that to all the Ivy League schools in the US. Alot of them have been applying for patents which deal with discoveries they've had in their academic research. The result is that the school gets all royalties... kind of a scarey though actually, that universities have the potential to become an economic power instead of just an academic power.
  • Here [mercurycenter.com] is a different article about the same subject. In that article, they say Geron's license prohibits the use of the technology to clone entire humans.

    I interpret this as: we will license the technology to other companies so other companies can develop or enhance this tecnhology but our patent will hopefully prevent ethical arguments from blowing out of proportion.

  • Re:Government Money was used for this (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @10:05AM (#1354877)
    Last night The Irish Times hosted a lecture by Ian Wilmut (excellent talk, btw), and during the q&a he was asked about patenting. His reply was that the UK government was cutting back on research, and that the Roslin Institute needed the money. On the back of the patent, they were able to get investment and increase spending; pre-investment they were spending GBP400,000 a year, and they're able to spend ten times as much now.
    He also pointed out that the Institute doesn't qualify for Wellcome Trust grants, leaving patents as the most obvious method for paying the bills and increasing their research budget.
  • It's not a bad patent, but it depends on intent. The intent here seems to be to protect themselves while telling everyone else how to do it too.

    However, I don't like patents in general. So therefore, I am going to patent the splicing of genes from two homo-sapiens, to create a third homo-sapien with characteristics from the first two. :-)

    (I'll let the crowd figure that one out. :-)

    ---
  • this means even cheaper, tastier lamb chops - now with foetal brain flavour!

    Definitely innovative and non-obvious, until this was done there was repeated insistence that animal, unlike plant, cells would never be able to be used for cloning as they were not totipotent.

    W.r.t. the mad scientist, well - mad scientists are good for driving technology and thus the best thing to do is to clone the mad scientist thousands of times. Thus, even for heinous crimes the guilt is distributed over many bodies and the individual punishment is thus negligible as the moral quota tends to 1/infinity.

  • After all, this is not a machine or mechanism

    It could be argued that it is the construction of a particular type of machine - a biological machine. Just because the parts are made of cells doesn't mean that this is no less a mechanism. They've shown a way to take bits of things found in nature and use them to create other things. Would we argue against nano-tech because it used atoms? - merely a process that puts molecules together in different ways?

    What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."

    Restricting access to things that are necessary for life and health go on all the time under our current system. Hence the high price of drugs for the third world etc. It's capitalism.

  • Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI [ebi.ac.uk]is pretty committed and there are links available through [kachinatech.com]
  • Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI [ebi.ac.uk]is pretty committed and there are links available through the Scientific Applications on Linux [kachinatech.com] site. Perhaps it's such a large area that it would be a good thing to have an independent /.-like site that provided forums for these discussions - taking sci.molbio etc to a nicer medium, it could allow for sharing of graphics which would help some awkward discussions.
  • Excuse (1) : It rewards the innovators and thus encourages innovation.

    Sorry, but this is a valid reason. sure, newton discovered laws of gravity and Kepler the laws of planetary motion without the security of patent law, but most of the patents taken out these days are by large companies who simply would not pay the extraordinary R&D costs that they do to invent something that could be used by their competitors.

    Trade Secrecy law in the US is much, much weaker than patent law. If IBM were to create a new way to store billions of bits in a cubic centimeter and called it a trade secret, and someone took it apart and figured out how it worked, poof! Trade secrecy benefits are legally gone. If a disgruntled employee walks and posts it on the net, they could sue the employee, but still, Poof! It's gone. Pharmecutical companies would close their R&D departments, and you're dense if you think universities or GPL groups could pick up the slack.

    On another point, your example:

    Innovation and inventions like TCP/IP, WWW, HTML, XML would have been
    far less successful they were patented.

    While arguably true (if the patent owner didn't give a public license to use the technologies), this example is flawed, as these are protocols whos very essence is based on the premise that everyone uses them. A cloning process doesn't require that everyone in the world use the same cloning process, or people will explode when they touch each other (which is a loose metaphor for what would happen if someone with an IPX stack tried to talk to someone with a TCP/IP stack).

    I just find it incredibly amusing when luddites who want to forgo patent law preach using technology that never would have come about if patent law hadn't offered some protection of development time and costs. After all, what good are HTML, XML, TCP/IP and HTTP if you don't have chips to run them?

    Trade Secrecy law is for processes, not inventions. Once something leaves your house, trade secrecy law won't offer a strong enough protection for it to be worthwhile for you to invent anything.


    Finally, your comment that the time to reverse-engineer something would give sufficient lead time for an inventor to recoup R&D costs would only serve to stem the flow of progress that you think would be accellerated by forgoing patent law.

    First, the billions spent on inventing and testing a new drug can't be recouped in the months it would take a competing pharmecutical company (computer company, biotech lab, etc) to bring an identical product to market.

    Second, using Dolly as an example, in those cases where reverse-engineering is much more difficult, without the protection that patent law provides, the Dolly scientists would not have released their process to the public, which means that the 30 or so derivative works based on the technology could not have moved forward.

    If company X creates something and patents it, companies A, B, and C can all start creating inventions that build on that new creation, pushing forward the advancement of humanity. If company X makes it a trade secret instead, company A may manage to reverse-engineer it, but certainly wouldn't share the process, once they finished reverse-engineering it, with companies B and C, because it still gives them a competitive advantage to keep their new found knowledge as a trade secret themselves. Company B can't reverse engineer it, because it's a small lab with limited funds, and company C might spend so much time reverse engineering, that out would be cheaper for them to simply purchase a license for use from company X.

    Patent's aren't inherently bad things. Patents can be too broad, but that's another issue. TGrade secrecy law inhibits progress more than patent law, especially if companies are good at keeping their secrets. This is far worse.

  • And then they go and patent the thing which was the product of their research, and take all the money to itselves?

    From the article:
    "The patents, numbered GB 2318578 and GB 2331751, and are jointly owned by the Roslin Institute, the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the government through its Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF).

    "The patents and the various commercial tie-ups agreed by Roslin will see substantial amounts of cash flow into the publicly-funded Scottish research centre. "

  • yeah the only problem with it is why should

    anybody anywhere else to something stupid like

    this ?

  • Dangerous ground. (Score:5)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:27AM (#1354886)
    While this certainly seems to be a reasonable application of patent law, rewarding a genuinely impressive advancement of the state of the art, I wonder what kind of precedent this sets.

    After all, this is not a machine or mechanism, but a procedure developed in the course of scientific research.

    To what degree will this inhibit research into improvements on the method?

    What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
  • Geron? Genom? Sounds suspicious to me!
  • This should be easy enough to get around. Just name your sheep something other than "Dolly".
  • No, this is NOT reasonable. Labs across the world have been doing this research for many, many years. This was not a matter of a single break-through, it was a culmination of lots and lots of research. My fiance' is doing a project right now where she is trying to come up with the 'cell line' to be able to clone felines. Apprarently the process is different per each species. Ask her, she's the genetics person. But these people patented an idea that has been in use now for a bit, and all the people around the world, such as my fiance', who are doing this last-stage process now have to stop. All the research she's done, months and months of work, is gone. All because of some stupid patent. The HARD work is figuring out what to put in the cells. What this patent does is stop the EASY part, which is just putting the genetic material into the cell.
  • Surely you can't patent cloning, because there is always prior art! :)
    --
  • That's a good point - a lot of us tend towards the feeling that patents are evil and horrible and that they stifle progress, yadda yadda. It's important to remember how hard (and how long) some of these people worked to get as far as they have. If it weren't for then we wouldn't have this technology and I think it's fair to give them a few years of monopoly in return for that.

    I don't personally believe that, with todays level of technology advancement, any patent should be given for more than 10 years. But that's an entirely different issue.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Actually, sheep cloned using this procedure should be called Dollys(tm). In this way, when they've gotten a sheep that produces really great wool, and they decide to clone it and sell the clones they can say to garmet manufacturers, "Are your clothes made from boring old sheep or Dollys(tm) the exciting sheep cloned from the world's best wool producer."
  • It wasn't really clear in the BBC story, but what I believe it says is that the original research team, along with the government agencies, would receive the proceeds that relate to cloning animals that produce human medicine in their milk, whereas Geron would get any licensing revenue resulting from using the technology for any other purpose (for example, to produce leaner beef, or pigs that can be brought to market quicker, or cows that produce more milk, etc.)
  • It depends on the definition of "entire human"! If I make a clone of myself that is complete except for some specific traits I don't want to keep anyway (for example, the whole aging thing) would I still be complying with the patent agreement.

    Human Cloning is a moral and ethical argument, it should NOT be left up to lawyers to work out! Anytime we let the law dictate our moral code we tend to get ourselves in trouble (for example, prohibition, abortion, euthanasia, etc.)
  • Just some quick background ...

    I work at Infigen in Wisconsin, USA. We were the first lab to clone a cow using nuclear transfer. We have several issued and pending patents on the nuclear transfer process. We also have the largest herd of cloned cattle in the world

    The patent situation for cloning is as messy as with computer technology. The claims being allowed are extremely broad, and we all use the same technique for the most part. There are minor variations in growth media, activation protocols, etc.; and we all seem to be awarded patents based on those variations.

    The approach to writing patents for cloning is the same as in other areas of biotech - make your claims as broad as possible and let the lawyers sort it out. I expect things to get nasty here in the near future ...
    • Isn't there some sort of unwritten rule that says academic and government institutions work for the benefit of the scientific community, not in an attempt to gather revenue? Apparently not, or it's being ignored.

    I agree with you, except it can be unreasonable to expect this to work. I mean, I won't say much about government, but academic institutions [ualberta.ca] can really use that revenue. Tuition costs only make up for a small percent of a university's income (speaking for Canadian Universities...). The rest comes from other sources, such as government funding (which is becoming less) and from spinoff businesses from university research and development.

    If the university didn't try to turn up a profit, the university could not exist. Tuition from students is not nearly enough to cover the costs of operation.

  • Yes, it must be remembered that it took a very particular set of procedures to get the cloning to work, that it took decades for someone to figure out how to do it despite many incredibly intelligent people trying, and that many of the leading experts in the field thought it impossible in mammals.

    If this doesn't deserve a patent, then nothing does.
  • I'd hardly lump Linux into the same group with major scientific accomplishment! Cloning *nix is completely different than cloning sheep. One is a massive and repeatable chunk of code finished in a few years; the other is a ethically-charged medical proceedure relying in hundreds of years of research.
  • Perhaps you should switch to raising rats. They're smarter than your average lawyer, smell better, and will never bite the hand that feeds them.

    What do you call 1,000 dead lawyers? A good start!
  • "...or pay them large sums of carbon dioxide for the privelege."

    Don't we already do that :) We're also paying off the sulfur digesting bacteria to help ward off future lawsuits...

  • Is every scientific break through from now on going to be patented like this? Luckily in the case of Linux the GPL has prevented things of this nature. We'll just have to see...

  • along with two government agencies that helped fund the research

    The method is being patented so that those who funded the research can use it as a source of revenue. The UK Government is funded by the people of the United Kingdom (obviously).

    They should use the patent for what benefits the people the most: release it to the scientific community in general (for any use). The UK Government is not a business. It should not be trying to turn a profit.

    Isn't there some sort of unwritten rule that says academic and government institutions work for the benefit of the scientific community, not in an attempt to gather revenue? Apparently not, or it's being ignored. Oh well.

    -V

  • Tomorrow's News (Score:3)

    by Valur ( 87561 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:11AM (#1354903)

    Researchers patent the scientific method!

  • We'll call them when we need more sheep (Score:4)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @11:11AM (#1354904) Homepage Journal
    I gather this patent allows them to corner the world market for CLONED SHEEP, which could potentially run into the BILLIONS of dollars over the next decade.
  • WASHINGTON -- In a move which surprised relatively few people, scientists have patented the cloning technique known as "embryo splitting". This technique involves forcing an embryo to split in two in the early stages of development.
    It was pointed out that prior art existed, in the form of twins born naturally. Geoff Carpenter, the patent lawyer who represented the scientists, commented "Just because a technique which is exactly the same in almost every respect already exists does not mean that it is prior art." The lawyer went on to add "Besides, it's not likely that God will sue us. He's much too busy with the gene patenting crowd at the moment."
    More as it develops.

    [Disclaimer: The above was a work of fiction, a bit of humor. Please don't interpret it as flamebait -- the actual patent discussed in this topic seems to be pretty valid, as nothing like it exists or has existed.]
  • "The human body is riddled with what, if it was engineered rather than evolved, could only be called kludge." The human body may contain "kludge", but we can not even attempt to design many of the bodies elaborate systems. While recent advances have made it possible for the blind to have partial vision, look at the techniques used. The equipment is cumbersome and not nearly as effective as the human body. The most powerful computers cannot begin to model the folding of proteins that naturally occurs. The bottom line is that nature is excellent at finding optimum solutions to the point current technology only begins to rival nature.

  • Well deserved?? So WHAT? I don't like it anyway. (Score:3)

    by jw3 ( 99683 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @09:03AM (#1354907) Homepage
    Although I don't think that the cloning patent is as ridiculous as one of those from amazon-click-once-dpt., I am quite sure that you don't have the full picture here, basically due to huge media coverage Wilmut got with his Dolly.

    First, he was "sitting on the back of the giants" - there was huge research in this field going for years. He didn't start with nothing: he definitely was the first one to get to the point of having a clone of a mammal not derived from embryo cells, but there are still some important issues. I wonder whether this patent is going to stop the scientific community from doing further research.

    This patent is much more disturbing then the one from Amazon (after all, one click, two clicks, who cares, how much time you spend on reading the book you've bought with this marvellous technology?). It will hamper some of the most important research fields in modern medicine, like getting finally xenotransplants work.

    If everyone patented every scientific discovery the way Wilmut did you wouldn't be reading slashdot now. And Wilmut wouldn't have had even the chance of starting his research. On the other hand - yes, I agree, the team at Roslin Institute is responsible for the breakthrough - namely, choosing the right cell cycle stage for nuclear transfer. Remember, he did not invent the nuclear transfer, which has been conducted for the first time in 1952.

    Regards,

    January

    P.S. Two links for you:

    The Cloning of Dolly [ndirect.co.uk], a nice and easy explanation what is this nuclear transfer all about and how cloning works, and

    A brief history of nuclear transfer [bbsrc.ac.uk], a nice essay at the Roslin Institute.

  • Open source, patents and scientific community (Score:4)

    by jw3 ( 99683 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:52AM (#1354908) Homepage
    There is an article in today's Nature [nature.com] issue entitled "In praise of open software". It states, among other things, that "[bioinformatic] Tools [for genomics] that add value to genome data are to be welcomed, but as the licensing strategy being adopted by Celera Genomics becomes clear (see page 231), it gives new grounds for wariness." I know this is slightly off-topic, I just want to stress that the growing number of patents / license in my field of science is a matter of concern for many biologists, as it is clear from this article in the leading scientific journal.

    Unfortunately, those of you who have no access to "Nature" cannot read the full article, but I put some exerts here [uni-heidelberg.de]. Actually, it was my today's slashdot submission (rejected, of course - I have never seen anything posted to slashdot referring to any good biological site). I thought the article is interesting, because it targets the whole scientific community (there is hardly a biologist out there not reading "Nature"), and is the first article in such a journal which mentions Linus Torvalds and Linux, therefore making these names known to a large number of scientists who never heard them before. In a certain way, it could bring Linux more publicity then an editorial in "Times".

    Regards,

    January

  • Think of all the money you could get from licensing!

    Amazon.com has proved that you can patent ANYTHING.
  • Although I'd agree that the recent spate of patents on business models and "obvious" inventions (that haven't been weeded out by the obviousness requirement in US law) do suggest that the patent laws need updating to cope with the most recent inventions, I think that your comment is unreasonable.

    The patent system was introduced as a kind of incentive for development and research. It ensures that if you spend a lot of time and effort developing something new, then you have the right to benefit from your work. In this, and most other , instances the money is fed back into more research, and the invention benefits people. If the user attempts to abuse the patent by pricing it too high, the economic market will reject it, and the incentive will induce other researchers to better the patent or provide an alternative technology.

    All in all most scientific breakthroughs are already "patented like this" - it's not a new phenomonon - and it doesn't cause harm.

  • Hmm.. has anybody pantented a patent yet? I might.. should earn me some spare cash.
  • The process being patented is not really that useful. Using it, you can clone a mammal every 100 to 500 tries, depending on your skill. Each attempt takes at least a couple of days before the cell can be implanted into the host mother's uterus. Then you have to wait a few days to see if the mammal is pregnant. It is not efficient enough to be practical.
  • UK patents can be renewed every five years for up to 25 years. However, in the US patents expire after 20 years, correct? So will this patent be protected internationally for the 25 years it is legal in the UK, or the 20 years that a patent applied for in the US lasts?
  • I guess that this means that the sheep farmers can sell the original and keep the clone for their own perverted devices. I dunno i'm tired and drunk.
  • I'm going to have to agree with you there Anon .... People should remember there is probally more than 1 way of cloning something. Look at M$. Lets hope the world of cloning doesnt blow up like the world of the software giants .. sheep everywhere will just randomly core-dump - and that will get messy.
  • Maybe Linus can patent the process used to clone *NIX?

    That way he could sue anyone who used his method to clone any OS.

  • I think that this is a good patent (Score:3)

    by buckrogers ( 136562 ) on Thursday January 20, 2000 @07:23AM (#1354917) Homepage
    These researchers have a formula to produce clones. They are only trying let everyone know exactly how their process works, while protecting their lifes work.

    This is exactly what the patent process is supposed to do. Otherwise these researchers would keep their work secret and that would hold back other peoples work. People would have to reinvent the wheel everytime they wanted to do any research at all.

    They are not abusing the patent process by trying to patent life or something obvious to anyone. They aren't broadly trying to patent the whole idea of cloning, only one method of doing so.

    This is a _good_ thing.
  • I'm not nearly so shocked as I could be.

    I mean, it's only a patent on one specific technique, as near as I can tell.

    Impact to me? Umm....none that I can see, at least at this time.

    On another note...

    Gene therapy scares me. I still don't think we understand what we are really messing with. I'm not worried about any kind of moralistic issues regarding gene therapy and cloning, just the scientific ones. Nature has been at this for a long long time, and I suspect that it's figured out the best methods for handling the improvement of genes.

    Just my opinion, mind you.

    Sakhmet
    "When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95."

  • Actually, I never mentioned anything about efficiency. Natural selection is NOT (IMHO) efficient. It is merely very good at what it does, over the long term.

    I'm torn. We can map the genome, but can we ever really understand it? We can throw more instructions-per-second at it, and we can look at it from every angle, but will we ever understand the complex interaction of one segment of DNA with another?

    No, I don't think a billion sperm to ferilize one egg is efficient, but it does ensure survival of the fittest (sperm, in any case).

    Sakhmet
    "When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95."

  • It will protected for 25 years in the UK. People in the US could probably use the technique after 20 years, they just couldn't import/export it to the UK.

    The above information is a WAG (wild assed guess) but seems logical, however lawyers are involved so....

  • Nature has been at this for a long long time, and I suspect that it's figured out the best methods for handling the improvement of genes.

    Nature isn't all that efficient/good at finding optimal solutions, actually. The human body is riddled with what, if it was engineered rather than evolved, could only be called kludge. (Check out the way our eyes and gonads work, for example)

    Evolution is a process of cumulative nudges (and sometimes giant leaps), and we all know what you wind up with when you just pour new work on top of old: legacy systems, in this case legacy genes. How much genetic garbage is in our DNA?

    I agree that we don't yet know the full ramifications (hell, we don't even have the full genome mapped *yet*) of tinkering with parts of our genetic code, but I don't agree that "natural design" is at all efficient.

    Anyone else think billions of sperm to fertilize *one* egg is innefficient?
  • While recent advances have made it possible for the blind to have partial vision, look at the techniques used. The equipment is cumbersome and not nearly as effective as the human body. The most powerful computers cannot begin to model the folding of proteins that naturally occurs. The bottom line is that nature is excellent at finding optimum solutions to the point current technology only begins to rival nature.

    Sure, *current* technology. 20 years from now, however? Who can say?

    The thing that gets me is that many people seem to have reverance for the way nature does things, kind of like "this is the way it's always been done, therefore this is the best way."

    That makes no sense on the face of it. If we just lived "naturally," we'd all be dead by about 40, 45 tops, crippled by minor injuries, etc.

    As to how this is relevant to the issue of something as complex as genetic improvement, well, what is DNA except for a remarkably (by today's standards) code? What are genes but tricky, semi-tempermental ways to send that information?

    Let me put this into quasi-programmer jargon:
    Evolution/nature's methods of genetic improvement are about as efficient and effective as bubble sorting (and poorly done bubble sorting, at that).

    Nature has design faults that would never be tolerated in a properly run project. Appendix?! WTF! Cross-linking and cell-replication errors? Cancers? Didn't anybody friggin beta-test this thing?

    Anyway, to get off the rant... Sure, it does something pretty cool *now,* but if intelligent design were involved from the git-go, we'd be in a much better place.

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