January 5, 2022

IP Goes Pop! Season 2, Episode #6: Jurassic Patents

This week on IP Goes Pop! Volpe Koenig attorney and Ph.D., Douglas Bucklin joins co-hosts and Shareholders Michael Snyder and Joseph Gushue to travel back in time, and somehow also to the future, to explore intellectual property interests in the area of genetic engineering.

In this episode, Michael, Joe, and Doug discuss, among other pop culture icons, the Jurassic Park movies and how the genetic engineering technology discussed in those movies relates to science and intellectual property in the real world. Whether the idea of a real-life dinosaur park thrills or terrifies you, it is no longer an idea that can be dismissed as purely science fiction. As this conversation explores, recent advances in the methodologies of genetic engineering may one day make a dinosaur park a reality. Listen as Doug discusses the competing methodologies that could potentially reverse the extinction of the dinosaurs, and how one recent experiment inched the scientific community closer to that goal.

The discussion then dives into how intellectual property laws treat living organisms. Can you get a patent for a clone? What about for DNA or a living organism itself? Learn about a famous clone, Dolly the sheep, and the distinction between natural and synthetic DNA as these questions get addressed in this episode.

In this episode:

  • “Jurassic Park” Movies Overview – The Genetic Possibilities
  • A Look into Genetic Engineering
    • Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)
    • Genetic engineering from your garage?
  • The current state of patent law for the life sciences
    • “What could have been patented in the ‘Jurassic Park’ universe?”
    • “Are cloned things patentable subject matter?”
  • Glofish – genetically engineered fish that glow!
  • Pop Culture and Genetic Engineering
  • Will humans bring back extinct species?
    • Possible methods of resurrecting the dinosaurs
    • Current efforts to revive a mountain ibex and an Australian frog species

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