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Comment by novia | Hacker News Reader

Can we force the evolution of nitrogen fixing organelles in plants like soybeans, which can already fix nitrogen through symbiosis, by knocking out a couple of genes in the nitrogen fixing bacteria to force it to become more reliant on its host?

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I can see that being patented, sold only to those that can pay, nearby farms that get pollinated with the gene being sued, the patenting company getting into financial trouble, the gene being banned to protect interests in the name of nature. You know, the usual story:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...

It would not pass the non-obviousness criteria. Both gene editing and the existence of pre-existing organelle are prior art, and combining those would be obvious to anyone in the field.

yes...but one click purchasing got patented (by amazon), while purchasing existed and so did clicks...

Creating a food crop plant that contains these organelles will be an incredible challenge. They will need to solve dozens of difficult technical problems. It is obviously non-obvious.

You might not get the patent on the whole concept, but you can probably get many different patents on the details needed to make it work.

I can see it dramatically reducing the need for fertilizer, making farming cheaper and less polluting. I hope the patenting company does protect its IP and makes a ton of money from the good it would do for the world.

I’d also be fine with taxpayers paying for it getting developed at a university and just being free to use after that.

Its probably more straightforward to introduce those genes into the plant directly

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