Imagine a world in which parents can genetically enhance their child's height so that he becomes a professional basketball player. Or imagine a law school student preparing for the bar who takes out an extra loan to genetically enhance his intelligence. What if going to your physician for a routine physical included the option of genetically enhancing any trait you desired? And what if such a practice was expensive and, therefore, only available to the privileged members of society? Is this desirable or should the U.S. government ban genetic enhancement? What if the government bans it and citizens travel abroad to receive genetic enhancement treatments? Can the U.S. government do anything to prevent access to illegal genetic enhancement abroad?
Recent developments in the field of European law, in relation to subject-matter consisting of living material, raise a string of basic issues as to the legal qualification of certain techniques used in agriculture and medicine, such as CRISPR-Cas9, and regarding their appraisal under European patent law. The present article reviews a series of decisions, including the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in case C-528/16, the decision issued on 7 February 2020 by the French Council of State and the Opinion of the European Patent Office Enlarged Board of Appeal of 14 May 2020 on Referral G 3/19.
This paper presents a new mechanical freezing concept for freezing alum or other hydroxide sludges as a conditioning step for dewatering. The basic concept is to freeze a thin layer of sludge on a continuously moving fabric belt. Sludge is attached to the belt by a vacuum drum belt filter which also removes one-half of the water and thus reduces the amount of sludge to be frozen. Filter leaf tests were conducted to determine the operational parameters and approximate production rates of this concept. These tests show that freezing alum sludge in thin layers will separate out the water as ice crystals and transform the solids into the same type of granular material produced in natural freezing beds. The average production rate of frozen sludge was 6.5 kg/hr.m2 at −20°C. The belt area needed for a 10,000-m3/day plant was estimated to be 48 m2. This concept has been patented by the U.S. Patent Office.
PRACTICE PATENT LAW BEFORE THE U.S. PATENT OFFICE AS A PATENT AGENT WITHOUT GOING TO LAW SCHOOL
