EC look to animal patents

An Empirical Look at Software Patents

U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequate...

A CRITICAL LOOK ANIMAL AT EXPERIMENTATION A Critical Look at Animal Experimentation

Small animal look-locker inversion recovery (SALLI)

Introduction and purpose Cardiac T1 mapping allows for quantitative analysis of myocardial tissue properties. Pulse sequences for human applications are not suitable for in-vivo studies in small animals.The aim of this study was to develop a single magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approach for comprehensive assessment of cardiac function and tissue properties in small animals with high heart ra...

Animal Decisions – A Look Across the Fence

It has been widely recognized that most decisions are made in a social context, and that these contexts do influence decisionmaking. The questions remains whether this influence is restricted to humans or primates, or whether this is a more general theme in animal decision-making. Social foraging theory predicts that an animal’s foraging choices are not only influenced by the balance in the rat...

Challenges to Dna Patents

The controversy surrounding patenting deoxyribonucleic acid (“DNA”) is hardly new. The first patent on a gene was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”) two decades ago, in 1982. As biological research was advancing rapidly in the 1980s, two trends combined to encourage the patenting and commercialization of DNA: the passage of pro-economic growth legislation and the e...