Diamond v. Chakrabarty — Patents

The Supreme Court held that a genetically engineered, oil-eating bacterium is patentable subject matter, opening the door to modern biotechnology patents.

In 1980 the Supreme Court confronted a question that sounds almost philosophical: can someone patent a living thing? In Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), a sharply divided Court answered yes, holding by a 5-4 vote that a genetically engineered bacterium capable of breaking down crude oil is patentable subject matter. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger’s opinion, issued June 16, 1980, declared that the relevant line is not between living and inanimate matter but between products of nature and human-made inventions. With that distinction, the Court cleared the legal path for the modern biotechnology industry—and supplied a phrase, “anything under the sun that is made by man,” that has echoed through patent law ever since.

At a glance

Case: Diamond v. Chakrabarty, No. 79-136, 447 U.S. 303 (U.S. June 16, 1980).
Court: Supreme Court of the United States; opinion by Chief Justice Burger for a 5-4 majority, with Justice Brennan dissenting (joined by Justices White, Marshall, and Powell).
Posture: On certiorari from the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, which had ruled for the inventor after the Patent Office rejected the organism claims.
Holding: A live, human-made microorganism is patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. 101 as a “manufacture” or “composition of matter”; the statute’s terms are broad and not limited to inanimate things.
Significance: Established that engineered living organisms can be patented, launching biotechnology patenting and framing the product-of-nature line later refined in Mayo and Myriad.

The oil-eating bacterium

Ananda M. Chakrabarty, a microbiologist at General Electric, engineered a strain of the soil bacterium Pseudomonas by introducing multiple plasmids—small loops of DNA—each capable of degrading a different component of crude oil. Naturally occurring Pseudomonas carried no such combination and could not break down oil in this way. Chakrabarty’s modified bacterium could, making it potentially valuable for cleaning up marine oil spills. His patent application included claims to the bacterium itself, but the Patent and Trademark Office allowed his process and inoculum claims while rejecting the organism claims, reasoning that living things are not patentable subject matter under Section 101. The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals reversed in the inventor’s favor, and the Commissioner of Patents, Sidney Diamond, took the case to the Supreme Court.

Reading Section 101 broadly

The Court grounded its decision in the text of 35 U.S.C. 101, which extends patent eligibility to “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.” Chief Justice Burger emphasized that Congress chose “expansive terms” and modified them with the comprehensive word “any,” signaling a wide scope. Drawing on the statute’s legislative history, he quoted committee reports stating that Congress intended statutory subject matter to “include anything under the sun that is made by man.” Against that backdrop, the engineered bacterium qualified: it was plainly a product of human ingenuity “having a distinctive name, character, and use.” The crucial point, the Court held, was that Chakrabarty’s claim was “not to a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon, but to a nonnaturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter—a product of human ingenuity.” The bacterium did not exist in nature; Chakrabarty had made it.

Living versus non-living was the wrong line

The government argued that living organisms are categorically excluded from patenting, pointing especially to the Plant Patent Act of 1930 and the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970. If Congress had to pass special statutes to allow patents on certain plants, the argument went, then ordinary utility patents must not reach living things. The Court rejected the inference. Those statutes, it reasoned, reflected practical concerns of their time—doubts that plants could satisfy the written-description requirement and an assumption that living things were unpatentable products of nature—not a considered judgment that Congress alone could ever extend patents to life. Burger framed the genuine dividing line as the one between “products of nature, whether living or not, and human-made inventions.” A new mineral discovered in the earth or a new plant found in the wild is not patentable; Einstein could not patent E=mc², nor Newton the law of gravity. But a living organism transformed by human intervention into something nature never produced falls on the patentable side.

The dissent and the limits

Justice Brennan’s dissent argued for judicial restraint in a field with profound implications. He read the plant-patent statutes as evidence that Congress had reserved to itself the decision whether to extend patents to living things, and he would have left the matter to the legislature rather than have the Court resolve it. The majority answered that broad statutory language, not the Court’s view of policy wisdom, controlled, and that genetic technology’s “gruesome parade of horribles” was a matter for Congress, not a reason to narrow Section 101. The decision did not erase the eligibility exceptions: laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas remained outside Section 101, a principle the Court would sharpen decades later in Mayo v. Prometheus (2012), AMP v. Myriad Genetics (2013), and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank (2014). Chakrabarty opened the door to patenting life that humans engineer; it never opened the door to patenting nature itself.

Open questions

How much human modification is required? Chakrabarty involved a clearly engineered organism; how much alteration transforms a natural product into a patentable invention has been contested ever since, culminating in Myriad’s gene-isolation analysis.
Where do higher life forms fall? The case involved a bacterium; later policy debates and PTO practice addressed multicellular organisms and humans, with humans excluded by statute decades later.
How do the eligibility exceptions cabin biotech patents? The product-of-nature, law-of-nature, and abstract-idea exceptions have grown more demanding, narrowing some of the space Chakrabarty seemed to open.

Implications

For biotechnology: The decision is the foundational green light for patenting engineered organisms, enabling the industry that followed in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and synthetic biology.
For patent applicants: Eligibility turns on human creation—claims should make clear that the organism or molecule is non-naturally occurring and the product of human ingenuity.
For the product-of-nature doctrine: Chakrabarty fixed the dividing line that Mayo and Myriad later policed; what nature makes stays unpatentable, what humans make may not.
For litigators: The “anything under the sun that is made by man” language remains a powerful framing for breadth, but it must be read alongside the strengthened eligibility exceptions.
For policymakers: The Court deliberately left the hard ethical and regulatory questions about engineering life to Congress, where many of them still reside.

Frequently asked questions

Can a living organism be patented? Yes, within limits. In Diamond v. Chakrabarty the Supreme Court held that a human-made, genetically engineered living organism is patentable subject matter under Section 101 because it is a manufacture or composition of matter. The relevant distinction is between products of nature and human-made inventions, not between living and non-living things.

What was the invention in Chakrabarty? Microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty engineered a strain of Pseudomonas bacteria carrying multiple plasmids that let it break down several components of crude oil, a trait no naturally occurring bacterium possessed. The bacterium was useful for cleaning up oil spills.

What is the significance of the anything under the sun phrase? The Court quoted committee reports stating that Congress intended patentable subject matter to include anything under the sun that is made by man. The phrase signals the broad reach of Section 101 and is still cited, though later decisions like Mayo and Alice have reinforced the exceptions for laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.