Attempt to Patent Artificial Organism Draws a Protest

An activist group's concern about maverick genome sequencer J. Craig Venter's intention to patent an entirely synthetic free-living organism has thrown a spotlight on the emerging intellectual-property landscape in this hot new field. The protesters claim that Venter wants his company to become the Microsoft of synthetic biology, dominating the industry.

Venter hopes to use the artificial life form, which he says does not yet exist, as a carrier for genes that would enable the bug to crank out hydrogen or ethanol to produce cheap energy. Duke University law professor Arti Rai says the patent, if awarded, "could be problematic" only if Venter's product became the standard in the field. But Venter says this application is just the start: He plans to patent methods that would cover more than the single microbe described in the application. "We'd certainly like the freedom to operate on all synthetic organisms" that could serve as a chassis for swapping out genes, says Venter, whose research team is at the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, but who recently started a company to commercialize the work.

Filed last October and published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on 31 May, the application describes "a minimal set of protein-coding genes which provides the information required for replication of a free-living organism in a rich bacterial culture medium." The application cites work by Hamilton Smith and others on Venter's team on a simple bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium that they are using to determine the minimum number of genes for life. They want to synthesize this "minimal genome" from scratch, get it working inside a cell, then add genes to produce cheap fuels (Science, 14 February 2003, p. 1006).

In a press release, the ETC Group, a technology watchdog in Ottawa, Canada, called Venter's "monopoly claims … the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesize and privatize synthetic life forms." ETC calls for the U.S. and international patent offices to reject the patent so that societal implications can be considered. ETC also cited a recent Newsweek interview in which the scientist says he wants to create "the first billion- or trillion-dollar organism."

Venter says this is just one of several patent applications that would give his company, Synthetic Genomics Inc., exclusive rights to methods for making synthetic organisms. The artificial Mycoplasma "may or may not be" the one used to generate hydrogen or ethanol, he says; his team is working on several species. "We haven't given any thought to" the licensing conditions, but in any case, they would not impede work in academic labs, says Venter, adding, "This is a problem that we hope will have hundreds of solutions."

Rai says the notion that Venter's Mycoplasma strain will dominate the way Microsoft's Windows did is tenuous because "about 10 things would have to happen," among them that Venter would create the organism, get the patent, and others would adopt his technology as the standard. Even if that happened, Venter "could do well [financially] and do good," she says, by licensing the technology at low cost as a research tool, as happened with the original patents on recombinant DNA technology.

Other synthetic biologists don't seem fazed. "He's shooting an arrow in the general direction that things are going," says Frederick Blattner of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has patented a stripped-down Escherichia coli and founded a company called Scarab Genomics that is commercializing the technology while disbursing it to academic researchers for a small cost. The more pertinent question, says Harvard's George Church, is whether the inventors' claims to have devised something useful will hold up, as there's no obvious reason why a completely synthetic Mycoplasma is needed rather than, say, modified E. coli to make hydrogen.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology synthetic biologist Tom Knight, who has pointed out that anyone could get around the patent simply by adding more than the 450 genes stipulated, says his complaint is that the application doesn't explain how to build the artificial cell. "I think it's rather tasteless," Knight says.