In short, it is reasonable to hypothesize that to the extent they arise at all, intellectual property complications will be greater in research involving at least some of these pathways than in genomic and proteomic research in general.

In consultation with USPTO supervising examiners in technology center “1600” (biotechnology), committee staff developed search algorithms for each of the categories of patents (see Appendix C). These searches were run on the patent claims field to obtain the number of U.S. patents and assignees, assignee countries, inventor countries, application years, and ultimate assignees over the period from January 1, 1995, to February 1, 2005. An independent search using the same algorithms for the same period was made subsequently by staff of the Georgetown University project. The numbers of patents found in the two sets of searches corresponded very closely but not exactly. In addition to U.S.-assigned patents, the searches included published U.S. patent applications and, for comparison, patents and applications issued by the European Patent Office (EPO). The “software,” “database,” and “algorithm” categories were limited to patent classification 435 (chemistry: molecular biology and microbiology). Table 4-1 summarizes the results. Especially for the “software” and “algorithm” categories, the class restriction may limit the results, because biologically related patents may have been placed in other patent classifications. It was not possible with the re-