this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
383 points (98.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43946 readers
645 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

He is wrong tho, natural substances can and are regularly patented when a use is found for them or a production method that's better is discovered.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Monsanto has entered the chat.

DNA shouldn't be patentable. I guarantee you that the scenario that Micheal Crichton laid out in Next will end up happening at some point unless we reign this shit in.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That was my initial reaction at first as well. However as far as I can tell, natural products are not patentable, unless the product in question has been modified, manipulated etc, to produce something that is deemed to have been significantly changed.

So, in the US, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that human DNA, being a naturally occurring product, cannot be patented. However, it also ruled that complementary DNA, essentially DNA that has been extracted and then modified in a lab, can be patented.