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Comment by arcastroe | Hacker News Reader

> The University of Texas at Austin discovered and isolated a broadly neutralizing plasma antibody, called SC27, from a single patient.

> The researchers have filed a patent application for SC27.

The antibody itself is patentable? What about the patient whose body created the antibody? Does this patient have any rights to it?

There's something about this that I don't like. Sure, if the antibody was engineered by the researchers, I could see it being patented. But discovered and taken as-is from another patient and then patented seems like a gray area to me.

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Naïvely, I'm hoping they're only patenting this so no one less savory can and will charge nothing to license it. I'm hoping.

I’d imagine the process of synthesizing the gene or proteins or similar is what’s patented, not the genetic material itself.

You can also patent the practice of using that antibody to prevent/cure a certain disease, similar to how there's a patent for "Methods of inducing sleep using melatonin" https://patents.google.com/patent/US5449683A/en

Why would that be a gray area? It’s a discovery, it’s a specific antibody. What’s the difference if it was discovered in a human, an animal model or in a screening of randomly generated sequences?

because a human made it. If it happened outside of their body, like that human being painted a picture, someone else coming along and taking it would be theft in some dimension, so why is taking something from inside their body any different?

Just because we have more science these days doesn't change the fact that it came from a person. If we didn't understand the science but that blood from this person cured the disease we'd be paying this person for every pint of blood they produced.

They didn’t “take something from inside their body” the patient consented to be included in a study.

These things are not done without informed consent, let alone against the patients will.

Provenance and attribution are concepts. How novel something can be presented is kind of the whole idea

Behold, my newest discovery: lumpy milk. How was it made? Time, my patent, and the plainant will tell

"Mere discovery" in general is a gray area, which many jurisdictions do not recognize as eligible for patent. Patents are supposed to incentivize creation. It's much less helpful to society to grant a monopoly on a naturally occurring thing, that already exists, to the first person to happen to stumble across it. Supposing it wasn't a protein from a single human, but a protein contained in all blueberries. Blueberries are now known to be a cure for Covid-19 if you eat tons of them. Should the discoverer of this world-changing fact be suddenly granted a monopoly on blueberries?

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