Placing Organic Chemical Compounds in the Public Domain

-- By TheodoreSmith - 18 Oct 2008

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chemical compounds are protected under US patent law as "compositions of matter." &lt cite needed &gt. A successful compound patent will provide the inventor with exclusive rights to all uses of that composition (including research) over the life of the patent. Although an inventor seeking a compound patent must show a use for the claimed composition, the same patent may ordinarily be defeated by prior art showing only the structure of the molecule and "enablement", a means of successfully building or synthesizing the chemical; no showing of usefulness is required. As advances in the material sciences refine techniques for the atomic level manipulation of matter, we are rapidly nearing the point where enablement of a given organic compound becomes trivial; any organic molecule may be constructed from its constituent atoms or pre-synthesized building blocks.

Once this threshold is reached, new organic chemical compounds will become far easier to push into the public domain. Even if such novel compositions are not ruled to be generally unpatentable under the doctrine of obviousness, they will be vulnerable to being placed into the public domain by any individual publishing a sufficiently detailed map of the molecules structure and a simple set of instructions enabling construction of the molecule. The low cost of publishing over the internet paired with the plausibility of algorithmic methods of generating molecular permutations and enablement steps almost guarantee the eventual construction of a database of molecular permutations. This database, showing structure and enablement steps for a wide swath of potential organic compounds, would have the effect of rendering unpatentable every compound appearing within.

Enablement and Scanning Electron Microscopes

Use Patents and Usefulness

Technical Issues to be Overcome

Conclusion