IN RE ROSLIN INSTITUTE : PRODUCTS OF NATURE AND SOURCE LIMITATIONS

The Federal Circuit's recent opinion in In re Roslin Institute2 is the court's first decision on the patent-eligibility of natural products after the Supreme Court's Myriad decision, which denied patent-eligibility to isolated genomic DNA. The holding itself is probably not significant; cloned animals have little commercial significance at present. But the court's requirement that inventions be 'markedly different' from their natural sources casts doubt the patent-eligibility of other biotechnological inventions, such as isolated human stem cells. This comment addresses two issues with the Federal Circuit's analysis in Roslin: the court's interpretation of Chakrabarty3 and Funk Brothers,4 and Roslin's requirement that structural or functional differences between natural and synthetic products must be explicitly recited by the claims.