Lawsuit seeks to invalidate Monsanto’s GMO patentsIngesting food which has had its DNA mucked with is dangerous, regardless of who does the mucking. The new lawsuit couldn’t come a moment too soon, given the USDA’s recent decision to allow rice modified with human genes by Ventria Bioscience.
"As Justice Story wrote in 1817, to be patentable, an invention must not be 'injurious to the well being, good policy, or sound morals of society,'” notes the complaint in its opening paragraphs, citing Lowell v. Lewis.
“Thus, since the harm of transgenic seed is known, and the promises of transgenic seed’s benefits are false, transgenic seed is not useful for society.”
This means, should the court agree, that all transgenic seeds fail the test of patent law. The suit has the potential to reverse patent approval on all biotech seeds, impacting BASF, Bayer, DuPont, Dow, and Syngenta, and others.
The suit then concludes, “Monsanto’s transgenic seed patents are thus invalid for violating the prohibition against double patenting.”
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