Patenting a living microbial cell: 40th anniversary of US supreme court decision diamond versus Chakrabarty.

Patents for microbiology and biotechnology are generally for a process (for example DNA cloning; Cohen and Boyer 1980; and polymerase chain reaction, PCR; Mullis 1987) and not for the microbe itself. The patent for oil degrading bacteria (Chakrabarty 1981) was different in that it covered the modified microbial cell itself, a Pseudomonas strain with laboratory-assembled plasmids that encoded the bacterial degradation of multiple components of crude oil. It was first applied for in 1972, initially refused by the patent office on the basis that it was a living organism, and then 8 years later in June 1980 allowed by the US Supreme Court ruling that this did not matter and the only issue was whether it was a novel manufactured product.