NB: This article relates the story of the long legal adventure that preceded the ruling of the Warf case by the Enlarged board of appeal of the European Patent Office on 25th November 2008.
Patenting human stem cells has become one of the most controversial issues of the bioethics field at the beginning of the XXIst century, at least in industrial countries.
— A series of “good” reasons may explain the importance of this on going controversy.
First, we may note that most of the issues related to patenting biotechnology have found a solution. This is the case with the questions of principles regarding patents on plants, animal or human genes or the clarification of the distinction between invention and discovery.
The 1998 EC Directive on patenting biotechnology has given answers to these questions and the jurisprudence of the national and European patent offices have applied the rules incorporated in the existing legal instruments. If some groups are still opposed to this new patent adventure, the reality is nevertheless there.
Secondly, patenting human stem cells raised again the issue of their embryonic origin and therefore appears as a good opportunity to resume the ethical and ideological debate on the “status” of the human embryo.
Third, it concentrates the critics made against using the human body and parts of it as an essential tool of “the new biology”, with a particular attention on the commercialisation of the human body. The fact that these critics are shared not only by anti-liberal radicals but also by established ethical or legal institution…