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TheodoreSmith-FirstPaper 7 - 30 Oct 2008 - Main.TheodoreSmith
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THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS | | | Advances in the atomic level manipulation of matter have brought modern science to within striking distance of the ability to manually construct novel molecules from their constituent components. In a 2002 paper, Hla and Reider detail the ways in which technicians may manipulate a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to sever and reform atomic bonds, reposition atoms, and manipulate molecular structures to form novel molecular structures. Although this technology is still in its infancy, the manual construction of molecular compounds is undeniably possible, and one day may become trivial with further advances in equipment and scientific technique. In the last 19 years, the state of the art in atomic manipulation has moved from the painstaking repositioning of Xenon molecules, to the breaking and reforming of bonds within a molecule itself; it is merely a matter of time before the construction of complex molecular compounds becomes scientific reality. | |
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< | Losing Enablement | >
> | The Strange Properties of Molecules | | | | |
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< | Once the manual construction of any sufficiently described molecule becomes technically feasible, enablement is almost certain to become trivial to a person skilled in the technical art. Computer programs that permute and diagram extant molecular structures are scientific reality; an algorithm capable of generating build routines for known chemical structures would likely be even simpler to develop. | >
> | Once the manual construction of any sufficiently described molecule becomes technically feasible, enablement is almost certain to become trivial to a person skilled in the technical art. Computer programs that permute and diagram extant molecular structures are scientific reality; an algorithm capable of generating build routines for known chemical structures would likely be even simpler to develop. | | | Trivial enablement, by itself, is no block to patentability. Many simple mechanical devices are trivial to enable. Molecular structures, however, have the additional property of having a form consisting of a collection of discrete and finite components. The structure of simple molecule, such as H2O? , can be described in detail simply by extrapolating from the basis of its chemical formula. More complex chemical forms have many more possible structural arrangements, and are more difficult to describe; however, techniques for permuting the possible structures of these complex molecules have been developing in the prior art for some time. | |
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< | The combination of trivial enablement and a finite structure would place chemical compounds in an unique class of material, respective to patent law. Simply by naming a | >
> | The combination of trivial enablement and a finite structure would place chemical compounds within an unique class respective to patent law. A full description and build routine of a novel compound could be generated from a small amount of descriptive data, in some cases as little as a name.
Legal Ramifications of Trivial Enablement
Legally, the trivialization of the enablement step could | | | Once techniques for systematically fabricating chemical compounds enter the scientific mainstream, the enablement of any sufficiently well described molecule becomes trivial (or at least may be rendered trivial by the development of a computer algorithm capable of generating enablement steps from chemical diagrams). Once this point is reached, any novel compound could be placed in the public domain simply through public online publication of its chemical structure and build routine; an extensive database of permutations of chemical forms would provide a legal basis on which to invalidate new compound patents. |
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