They have cause for concern. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, synthetic biology shares characteristics of both software and biotechnology. Remember the focus on reducing functions to black boxes. Synthetic biologists are looking for the biological equivalents of switches, valves, and inverters. The more abstractly these are described, the more they come to resemble simple algebraic expressions, replete with "if, then" statements and instructions that resolve to "if x, then y, if not x, then z." 50
If this sounds reminiscent of the discussion of the Turing machine, it should. When the broad rules for software and business methods were enunciated by the federal courts, software was already a developed industry. Even though the rules would have allowed the equivalent of patenting the alphabet, the very maturity of the field minimized the disruption such patents could cause. Of course "prior art" was not always written down. Even when it was recorded, it was sometimes badly handled by the examiners and the courts, partly because they set a very undemanding standard for "ordinary expertise" in the art. Nevertheless, there was still a lot of prior experience and it rendered some of the more basic claims incredible. That is not true in the synthetic biology field. 51
Consider a recent article in Nature, "A universal RNAi-based logic evaluator that operates in mammalian cells."12 The scientists describe their task in terms that should be familiar. "A molecular automaton is an engineered molecular system coupled to a (bio)molecular environment by 'flow of incoming messages and the actions of outgoing messages,' where the incoming messages are processed by an 'intermediate set of elements,' that is, a computer." The article goes on to describe some of the key elements of so-called "Boolean algebra"-- "or," "and," "not," and so on--implemented in living mammalian cells. 52
These inscriptions of Boolean algebra in cells and DNA sequences can be patented. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, owns patent number 6,774,222: 53
This invention relates to novel molecular constructs that act as various logic elements, i.e., gates and flip-flops. . . . The basic functional unit of the construct comprises a nucleic acid having at least two protein binding sites that cannot be simultaneously occupied by their cognate binding protein. This basic unit can be assembled in any number of formats providing molecular constructs that act like traditional digital logic elements (flips-flops, gates, inverters, etc.). 54