Intellectual Property Rights

Diamond v. Chakrabarty

447 U.S. 303 (1980)

Facts

Genetic engineer Ananda Chakrabarty developed a bacterium capable of breaking down multiple components of crude oil.
He created the organism by introducing several plasmids into a single bacterium.
The engineered microorganism had potential use in treating oil spills.
Chakrabarty filed patent claims covering:
the process of producing the bacterium;
an inoculum containing the bacterium;
the bacterium itself.
The Patent Office allowed the process claims but rejected the claim to the microorganism.
It considered living things outside patentable subject matter.
The Patent Appeals Court reversed.
The Commissioner appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

Whether a genetically engineered living microorganism is patentable subject matter.
Whether the terms “manufacture” and “composition of matter” include a human-made bacterium.
Whether living status alone creates a patent exclusion.

Patent law extends broadly to any new and useful:
process;
machine;
manufacture;
composition of matter.
Laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable.
A naturally occurring organism merely discovered in nature is not patented simply because it has been isolated.
A non-naturally occurring living organism may be patentable where it is:
created through human intervention;
materially different from natural organisms;
useful.
The relevant distinction is not between living and non-living things.
It is between:
products of nature; and
human-made inventions.

Chakrabarty had not merely discovered an existing bacterium.
No naturally occurring bacterium possessed the same combination of oil-degrading capacities.
Through genetic manipulation, he produced an organism with characteristics markedly different from any found in nature.
The bacterium also had a specific practical utility in oil-spill control.
The Court interpreted “manufacture” and “composition of matter” broadly.
The statutory language was intended to accommodate future technologies not known when the law was enacted.
The fact that the invention was alive did not remove it from those categories.
Many patentable inventions involve biological material or natural forces.
Patent law protects the human-created application or product, not the natural law itself.
The Government argued that Congress should specifically authorise patents over living things.
The Court responded that the existing statutory language was broad enough and contained no general living-organism exclusion.
Ethical and policy objections to biotechnology could be considered by Congress, but courts could not create an exclusion absent from the statute.
The Court nevertheless maintained the product-of-nature limit.
A newly found natural organism would remain unpatentable unless human intervention created materially different characteristics.

The Supreme Court held, by a five-to-four majority, that Chakrabarty’s engineered bacterium was patentable subject matter.
It was a non-naturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter produced through human ingenuity.
Living status alone was irrelevant.
Use this case for: a human-engineered microorganism with materially different characteristics from natural organisms may be patented, while products of nature remain excluded.