Patents sought on life forms

Press, 29 February 1984, Page 22

Patents sought on life forms

PA Hamilton New laws allowing simple life forms to be patented by their discoverers are being sought in New Zealand, in a bid to achieve the kind of commercial protection now available in the United States.

The move, promoted by patent attorneys, has been prompted by the wide development in New Zealand of biotechnology, in particular the ability of genetic engineering to alter the lower life forms and create new ones.

It coincides with the successful patenting of a strain of Rotorua hot pool enzyme in the United States, giving New Zealand’s Development Finance Corporation what

amounts to an industrial copyright on any commercial potential the organism might have.

Applications for patent of the organism have been lodged in several other countries, but the corporation’s patent attorney, Mr Douglas Calhoun, said from Wellington at the week-end that such a move was impossible in New Zealand.

He said New Zealand law expressly prohibited the patenting of “naturally occurring substances,” including new life forms — an attitude he said was outdated in the light of biochemical advances and American precedent. Mr Calhoun said the entire patenting field was

being reviewed at present by the Industrial Property Advisory Committee, set up in 1981 by the Justice Department. He had no instructions from the Development Finance Corporation to challenge the ban on natural substances.

But his organisation, the Institute of Patent Attorneys, was about to lodge submissions opposing the law, mainly on grounds that the discoverers of new and commercially valuable organisms had no protection against exploitation of the organism by someone else. The submissions would emphasise that use of organisms had to be preceded by culture in the laboratory, a manufacturing process that should be patentable. Patenting in the United States of the hot pool organism, one of hundreds being studied by Waikato University’s enzyme research team, is a first for New Zealand. It is also one of only a few patentings of unmodified organisms. The first patenting of a life form happened in the United States in the early 19705, when the General Electric Company claimed it had invented and manufactured bacteria capable of cleaning up oil spills. The move was strongly opposed and went as far as the Supreme Court, which supported the view that “the fact that micro-organisms,

as distinguished from chemical compounds, are alive, is a distinction without legal significance.” About the same time as this 1980 decision, the first application had been lodged for the patenting of an unmodified organism, and that was when the Development Finance Corporation started lodging its own applications. Four years later, notice

of acceptance has been received by the D.F.C., with an official certificate expected within the next two or three weeks. The patent will be held by the corporation, but will also name the organism’s “inventors,” a biochemist, Dr R. M. Daniel, and a microbiologist, Dr H. W. Morgan, who head a Waikato University research team.