washington

The US patent office is claiming it has the authority to stop the issuing of a patent, on moral grounds alone, for ways to make human-animal chimaeras (see Nature 392, 423, 1998). The office is currently faced with a broad-ranging application for such a patent.

But the applicants — Jeremy Rifkin, the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, a Washington advocacy group, and Stuart Newman, a developmental biologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York — say that there is no legal basis for such an assertion.

Even if there was such a basis, they say, it would be impossible for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to draw a line defining what is and what is not morally acceptable.

Rifkin and Newman filed for a patent last December on methods for creating a ‘human/animal chimaera’, and say that their intention is to raise a broad public and legal debate about the implications of such a patent.

On the same day (2 April) that news first broke of the application, Bruce Lehman, the PTO commissioner, issued a statement asserting that the PTO's legal authority allows it to deny patents deemed to be “injurious to the well-being, good policy or good morals of society”.

Lehman's statement said it was the position of the PTO that inventions directed to human/non-human chimaeras could not be patentable “because, among other things, they would fail to meet the public policy and morality aspects” of patent law”. Lehman says that this position is based on a court decision of 1817.

Lehman also argued that Rifkin and Newman are engaged in an attempt “to panic people into an overreaction”. But the two applicants say that their application is based on perfectly feasible technology, and that patent law gives Lehman no ‘moral’ grounds for blocking an application.

Even if it did, they say, it would be impossible for the PTO to draw a line between ‘moral’ human-animal mixes and ‘monsters’. Newman asks: what would rationally distinguish their creation from inventions that have already been applied for, such as pigs carrying human genes as sources of transplantable organs?

Rifkin has already said that he would mount a legal challenge to any rejection of his application by the patent office.