remember the tv series"Manimal" ? did you love it? well we'll see what you think when kangaroo man eats you. this chimera business may have been slowed down by the following decision, but when the u.s. patent office is the only thing staving off half man alligator half sharks, you know that we are totally on our way to a nice little place i like to call extinctionlandia. what (or who) would you like to become? the woman faced dog? Dick Cheney's torso? oooh the future! it's gonna be osome because we're going to be mutated!
please future masters. kill us quickly.
U.S. Denies Patent for a Too-Human Hybrid
Scientist Sought Legal Precedent to Keep Others From Profiting From Similar 'Inventions'
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 13, 2005; Page A03
A New York scientist's seven-year effort to win a patent on a laboratory-conceived creature that is part human and part animal ended in failure Friday, closing a historic and somewhat ghoulish chapter in American intellectual-property law.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected the claim, saying the hybrid -- designed for use in medical research but not yet created -- would be too closely related to a human to be patentable.
Stuart Newman, a professor at New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y., had sought a ruling on whether the animal-human hybrid could be patented. (Philip Jensen-carter)
Paradoxically, the rejection was a victory of sorts for the inventor, Stuart Newman of New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y. An opponent of patents on living things, he had no intention of making the creatures. His goal was to set a legal precedent that would keep others from profiting from any similar "inventions."
But in an age when science is increasingly melding human and animal components for research -- already the government has allowed many patents on "humanized" animals, including a mouse with a human immune system -- the decision leaves a crucial question unanswered: At what point is something too human to patent?
Officials said it was not so difficult to make the call this time because Newman's technique could easily have created something that was much more person than not. But newer methods are allowing scientists to fine-tune those percentages, putting the patent office in an awkward position of being the federal arbiter of what is human.
"I don't think anyone knows in terms of crude percentages how to differentiate between humans and nonhumans
