Do I understand correctly that just physically extracting a certain piece of DNA from a cell ("purifying" it) makes it patentable? That seems silly.
Yeah, it's ludicrous - imagine that I tried to file for a patent on using a random (but useful!) phrase in English on the basis that I was able to write a Perl regex to pull it out of a web page.
And I won't even qualify that with the usual "poor analogy" disclaimer - it's almost exactly what the current law allows for, just replace "random phrase in English" with "snippet of DNA", and "Perl regex" with "biochemical reaction".
Yeah, it's ludicrous - imagine that I tried to file for a patent on using a random (but useful!) phrase in English on the basis that I was able to write a Perl regex to pull it out of a web page.
And I won't even qualify that with the usual "poor analogy" disclaimer - it's almost exactly what the current law allows for, just replace "random phrase in English" with "snippet of DNA", and "Perl regex" with "biochemical reaction".