Table 2.

Major Supreme Court Decisions Defining the Boundary between “Inventions” and “Products of Nature”

Case	Claimed Invention	Decision
American Wood-Paper Co. v. Fibre Disintegrating Co. (1874)	Refined cellulose caused by decomposition of the original substance	Not patentable, because the product is well-known to exist in nature and is in a “nearly pure” state
Cochrane v. Badische Anilin & Soda Fabrik (1884)	Artificial version of natural red dye alizarine produced by manipulating original	Not patentable, because being produced in a novel way does not make it a new composition of matter
American Fruit Growers v. Brogdex Co. (1931)	Fruit with skin treated with mold-resistant borax	Not patentable, because the mere addition of borax does not lead to the creation of a product that has a “new or distinctive form, quality, or property”
Funk Brothers Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co. (1948)	Mixture of several naturally-occurring species of bacteria	Not patentable, because aggregation of species does not produce any new bacteria or enlargement of the activity of the individual strains, and is hence only a discovery of the handiwork of nature
Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980)	Microbe with specially-inserted DNA plasmid	Patentable, because the bacterium is not found in nature
Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics (2013)	Isolated BRCA1 and BRCA2 DNA sequences cDNA	Not patentable, because merely isolating a naturally occurring DNA sequence does not constitute an inventive step Patentable, because cDNA is not found in nature