Nature's CRISPR and the Absurdities of Modern Patents and Patent Law

What the CRISPR Patent Dispute is All About is discussed by Jacob S. Sherkow at the Guest Blog at the Scientific American. Take a look there at some of the absurd and shameful issues that dismal patent granting have generated.

And the answer, in our opinion ... is ... that none of the purported "inventions" in the CRISPR disputes are or should be patentable inventions, because nothing new has been invented per se.

CRISPR means "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats" and they are there by NATURE, not by man-made creation.

As written at Gizmodo by Sarah Zhang in
Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA:

"CRISPR is far better than older techniques for gene splicing and editing. And you know what? Scientists didn’t invent it."

That's right, it is a NATURAL gene mechanism, a product of nature that scientists are merely exploiting, that is all.
Patentable in any way, shape or form?
NO, not in our book.

Just read that whole Gizmodo article and now ask why anyone should be able to get any kind of patents on CRISPR, which scientists are EXPLOITING, not inventing.

Just imagine patents on the way you could cut cloth or anything else with scissors. Or imagine your local butcher being limited by patents on how to cut meat. Or ponder patents for the way in which loggers would be allowed to cut trees. That is the game being played in the biological sciences.

The whole CRISPR dispute is ridiculous and anathema to the human spirit ... materially greedy people and institutions battle increasingly over who gets the massive monies that very wrongly granted patent monopolies generate -- not just on splicing and editing genomes, but also on products with rounded corners, etc.

Patents these days are not a matter of rewarding inventors fairly, but rather mean primarily the grant of extensive monopolies to persons or institutions, whereby those patents then create vast accumulations of wealth far beyond the benefits that any development they made actually provides to society.

Indeed, almost all of these purported "inventions" are nothing more than obvious steps taken on the basis of the constantly expanding state of the art, especially in the biological sciences. OBVIOUS STEPS.

That is why often multiple people often perceive next step developments at nearly the same time, because they are researching in obvious directions, directions that are obvious given the state of the art.

And what is obvious is not patentable.