The need for scientists to establish priority for their discoveries is fundamental, but how they do it changes with the years. In the seventeenth century, scientists encrypted their results in anagrams embedded in clearly dated letters sent to colleagues. When Galileo discovered the phases of Venus, he created a Latin anagram whose solution translates as: “The mother of love mimics the Moon's shapes”. Desperate to discover his rival's secrets, Johannes Kepler struggled to break the code. He thought he had when he derived a sentence referring to a red spot on Jupiter. Wrong issue, wrong planet and a century ahead of the discovery of the real thing.

Science publishing and patenting nowadays provide more transparent systems for establishing priority, but both are under pressure. In particular, patent offices everywhere have been swamped with applications since the revolutions in information technology, biotechnology and materials sciences, and have struggled to clear mounting backlogs. The European Patent Office (EPO) has coped by recruiting more examiners and by the driving productivity of its staff. But have productivity demands gone too far? Are patent examiners being pushed to work so fast, as they claim (see page 493), that they can't deliver quality patents that would withstand scrutiny?

EPO staff are not complainers by nature, so they should be listened to, particularly at a time when external stakeholders are also voicing concerns. Many observers say that the EPO's commercial orientation overly favours the applicants as customers to be satisfied. Others point to the registration revenues to national patent offices from EPO patents, and say that this factor discourages governments from pressing for quality over quantity.

But what exactly do we mean by patent quality? Any patent must demonstrate novelty, industrial applicability and the involvement of an inventive step. The EPO has a strong reputation in establishing novelty. But it is alleged to be granting some claims for industrial applicability that are inappropriately broad, and granting patents whose inventive step is debatable. Such concerns are themselves hard to test. It would take years to see how many patents are successfully challenged in appeal. Much more useful, and more provocative for the EPO, is the idea that it submit a selection of recently granted patents for external peer review. In the meantime, the concerns are coming from many directions, and confidence in the patenting system is, for the first time, being shaken. Furthermore, patent professionals complain that the quality of incoming applications is now also low.

The EPO's new president, Alain Pompidou, a French biologist, needs to make a clear statement about the office's commitment to quality as soon as he takes over on 1 July. And he must indicate what measures the EPO is going to take to monitor quality. To ignore so much concern would be counter-productive, and would only fuel the smouldering scepticism. Anagrams, anyone?