Thread by @Kevin_McKernan

The Credibility Trap.
When you want things to be true, you are most exposed to getting burned.

Let's examine the David Martin video that is going viral and see if it passes a few sniff tests.

Here is his dossier.
f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/8079569/…
It makes two claims about collusion with the CDC and Ralph Baric.
1)CDC illegally patented the SARs virus
2)Ralph Baric locked up all research on the synthetic versions of these.

Let us look at the CDC patent.

CDC patent was filed in the US in 2003 before Myriad case law. This means Diamond vs Chakrabarty set the legal precedence and natural sequence was patent eligible under 35-US-101. This contradicts David’s claims.
Don’t believe me. You can look this up in the USPTO PAIR system.

Here is how you do it.

portal.uspto.gov/pair/ PublicPair
Plug in patent number 7,220,852
Click the Patent Number search option

You’ll get a page that looks like this. Navigate to the Image File Wrapper page to see the prosecution history

You’ll see the entire public patent prosecution online.

Navigate to the Applicant Remarks/Made in an Amendment link. You will see only 102 rejection. Not 101 rejections like David claims. These 102 rejections were easily traversed once the CDC demonstrated that the prior art used their sequence.

There was nothing illegal about this in 2003. I don’t even think it’s Illegal post Myriad as the claim language only claimed an “isolated nucleic acid”. Here is the patent: patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/6b/c3/21/a62eb…

Notice there is only 1 claim. This is common with defensive patents. Notice the language regarding an ‘isolated nucleic acid’. This language was key to the Myriad patents.

I’m familiar with this case law as I invented and published a method to navigate the Myriad patents. This was published in Nature Biotech.
nature.com/articles/nbt.2…
researchgate.net/publication/33…

The CDC filed in the US which was a 1st to file jurisdiction at the time. But they were beat to pub by Marco Marra in CA which is a 1st to invent juris. The patents were doomed to end up in interference which is why we have not seen the CDC try to enforce these. HKU also filed.

A really good read on this history is include below. law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/…

I worked with Marco on the Human Genome Project. Stand up guy. He also agrees with the sentiments in our Nature paper. Natural sequence should not be patentable …BUT IT WAS!

So If Marco was first to invent but CDC beat them to filing, you have patent mess. Particularly when one inventor refuses to believe it is patentable.

So David’s claims regarding the CDC illegal patenting of the SARs genome are easily dismantled with public information. No 101 violations and even with Myriad case law, isolated nucleic acids likely fall under the Parke-Davis purification of adrenal/ Learned hand argument.

But this is a smoke grenade. Whether they are legal are not, doesn’t line up with his claims that they created a lock on the research in the field as a result of this.
Any researcher can order the SARs-CoV-2 genomic RNA or DNA from Biobanks like ATCC.

Nowhere on their product information or MTA does it mention CDC patents. This is usually where ATCC would remind the customers of additional licenses required for use of the product. No dice. Nothing. Zilch. Product Spec sheet attached.
atcc.org/api/pdf/produc…

Now let’s look at the other CDC patent related to qPCR detection of SARs1…not SARs2.
US Patent 7,776,521.
These are primers specific to SARs1.

The largest provider of CDC assays in the world is IDT.
It is customary for patent numbers to be exposed on the label of the products that utilize them.
I challenge anyone to find the CDC patent numbers on the PCR kits being used for C19 detection.
idtdna.com/pages/landing/…

IDT has sold over 62M of these tests. How is the CDC patent creating a lock on C19 investigation?

Next up is one of the Baric patents.
U.S. Patent 6,593,111
patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a6/c6/8c/1d501…

This provides no lock on the market as it is easy to get around. Modular genetics also has tools to get around traditional restriction enzymes and ligases.

Here is one way around it.

I’m familiar with this space as we used tools like this to construct libraries for SOLiD sequencing.
Nick Translation End Repair was a key part of long mate pair libraries in SOLiD. The tool is also applied in synbio. patents.google.com/patent/US20100…

Finally, David makes some confused claims about DNA assembly giving you any virus you dream of. This is just non-sense and even if it were true with short read platforms like Illumina, ONT systems now deliver 30Kb reads and don’t require any DNA assembly.sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

I have not interrogated every aspect of his dossier. I have only interrogated sections where I am a subject matter expert. None of those details check out.
This is what many of us call a Credibility trap.

It sounds like a bomb to end the pandemic but it's really a bomb to kill your credibility by citing it. It looks like a classic honey pot. There are plenty of critiques to go around on Baric and the CDC but I try to only stick to ones I think will hold up in court.

I have this flipped. US was 1st to invent. Canada was 1st to File. Damn Twitter/edit function. US is not harmonized with 1st to file law.

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US is Now harmonized with 1st to file but in 2003 it was 1st to invent.
So patent interferences could occur. No one would engage in this expensive process if CDC was not enforcing these and left them as defensive patents.

This is an important 2013 ruling.
Note what Justice Thomas says about cDNAs.
How do you sequence a 29kb RNA virus without making a cDNA...
In 2003.. you don’t. You make a cDNA.
This is why there is no Ex parte re-exam on the patent and it’s still valid today.

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A discussion on this topic with @Bretigne

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wha…

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