OncoMouse

Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart, Harvard, USA, patent 4,736,866 of 1988. The first patented animal.

Overview

Harvard geneticists Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart created a mouse carrying an activated cancer gene, making it highly susceptible to tumors for research. Following the logic of the Chakrabarty ruling, the US patent office granted the first patent on a higher animal in 1988, and DuPont, which had funded the work, held the license. The patent provoked debate worldwide. Europe granted a narrowed version, while the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2002 that higher life forms could not be patented there.