AR-News: (US TX) Protests end beagle patent, leave open questions

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

HoustonChronicle.com
June 28, 2004
 
Late last month, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center quietly canceled a patent  few 
people knew it possessed: the commercial right to make sick beagles. Hoping  to 
market a new drug for chemotherapy patients, the hospital had patented a  
technique for pumping research beagles with lethal fungi. Its decision to give  
the patent up is significant -- but for different reasons than one might 
expect.  
According to the patent application, beagles were chosen in part because  
their docile nature makes them good research subjects. Unsettling as this  
sounds, though, M.D. Anderson's decision to drop the patent had little to do  with 
whether winsome, friendly animals merit a different fate than homely  critters 
do. Neither did the decision reflect a different attitude toward using  
animals for research -- something the hospital defends. Instead, the episode  showed 
something simpler. When enough individuals complain, even giant  institutions 
must react.  
Two days before the cancellation, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office  
voiced its decision to re-examine the patent's validity. The decision came after  a 
challenge by the American Anti-Vivisection Society and PatentWatch Project, a 
 nonprofit group that monitors patent policy but does not have a position on  
animal testing in general. The groups questioned if it was truly "novel" to  
infect a beagle with a lethal fungus, and if a sickened beagle really was "a  
machine, manufacture, or inventor's composition of matter." Both designations  
are necessary to earn a U.S. patent.  
The groups now plan to challenge patents covering 500 other species of  
animals.  

full  story:
_http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2650244_ 
(http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2650244)   

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If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot  prevent us and because we are 
backing our own side in the struggle for  existence, it is only logical to 
cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or  capitalists for the same reasons. 
--C. S. Lewis (novelist and essayist)  
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