Fencing Fisher: Alternative Methods for Patenting Expressed Sequence Tags‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Mark Twain's words capture the state of technology in this country at the turn of the 20th century. The United States, at that time and currently, grants patents for any ideas that are new, useful, and not obvious. (2) What has followed from this is an explosion of this country's patent system, there are currently over 350,000 patent applications filed each year. (3) The field of biotechnology is one of the largest contributors to the influx of patent applications. One of the biggest controversies in the field is the patentability of DNA related compositions such as genes and expressed sequence tags ("EST"), which are fractions of expressed DNA sequences, used "for discovering new genes, for obtaining data on gene expression and regulation." (4) The controversy in this results partly from the newness requirement since genes, like all living things, are arguably not new; rather, they are only newly discovered since genes exist within. To this end, no inventor can claim them as their own new inventive idea.