“Diamond wins: life turned trade secret” – alternate history to reflect on industrial property rights in biotechnology
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Abstract
As of September 2022, the White House officially embraced biotechnology to generate innovative solutions for health problems,
climate change, energy scarcity, and food insecurity. Genetically modified organisms (GMO) alone account for more than 160 000 biotechnological solutions for technical problems. All these solutions have been disclosed to the public as a requirement for obtaining patent rights, excluding third parties of commercial exploitation. In this paper, we resort to alternative outcomes of the landmark Diamond v. Chakrabarty case on the patentability of GMO to illustrate the societal value of patents in biotechnology. The point of divergence set by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of Diamond creates a parallel reality where trade secrets prevail in biotechnology, representing an opportunity to reflect on the instructiveness of patents.
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