But don't worry, it's OK because you're only patenting the XOR of the original information string with a string of one's, not the original string itself. That's _clearly_ different. Someone please come in here and tell me why I've got this all backwards and this isn't actually a disaster built on an intellectually dishonest distinction without a difference. I'm not a biologist nor lawyer nor judge by any means, but this is what the ruling looks like to me.
The part about introns and exons is very important. Normal ("naturally occurring") DNA has a bunch of extra stuff that is not coded for proteins (introns) and that may not serve much useful function for therapeutic research but are useful as unique identifiers/markers.
The cDNA mentioned in the judgment is not a simple XOR of the original information. It is an XOR of the information after the section of DNA has been isolated, and with all the introns stripped out. Using cDNA, one cannot recreate the original full DNA strand because it is like lossy compression.
There's 3 billion base pairs in human DNA, not to mention the other millions of species out there. It seems like your chance of finding a naturally occurring complement to what you want, without introns, is pretty good.
Then what?
you're correct, it seems like me to be an intellectually misinformed decision. In all cases, a PCR reaction is essentially the creation of a molecule that never existed before in nature. Whether or not they played the trick with the introns.
1111000010101010
Patentable:
0000111101010101
But don't worry, it's OK because you're only patenting the XOR of the original information string with a string of one's, not the original string itself. That's _clearly_ different. Someone please come in here and tell me why I've got this all backwards and this isn't actually a disaster built on an intellectually dishonest distinction without a difference. I'm not a biologist nor lawyer nor judge by any means, but this is what the ruling looks like to me.