Thursday, November 16, 2006

Patent on DNA Sequencing Technique Disputed

This could get interesting: A tiny biotech company called Enzo Biochem has just stepped forward claiming that they invented the technique for sequencing DNA, though the patent on it was awarded to some scientists at Caltech nearly 25 years ago. According to today's New York Times: "the government says it will consider, nearly a quarter-century after the invention was made, whether it awarded the patent to the wrong party." It will be fascinating to see how this turns out, and what they'll do if the patent is reversed and granted to Enzo, how they'll deal with the massive amounts of money Caltech and Applied Biosystems -- the company that licenses the patent from them -- have made from it. And we're talking about a lot of money: This is the technique used to sequence the human genome.

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