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Abstract
A person who eats cornflakes at breakfast, puts on a cotton shirt, or takes a vitamin C supplement to ward off a cold almost certainly benefits from the US Supreme Court's 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty. It has been 25 years since this landmark decision, in which the Supreme Court held that a live, man-made microorganism is patentable subject matter under Section 101 of the US Patent Act. It was only after Chakrabarty that the PTO clarified what had been an inconsistent approach to patenting living organisms. The decision in Chakrabarty surely provided companies in the nascent biotechnology industry with the needed incentives to invest in the production of new medical treatments and drug therapies, new and better diagnostic tools, and stronger and more disease-resistant crops. It also emboldened the industry to seek patent protection on an ever-broadening range of technological advances.