Hundreds died at Naina Devi. Crazy dash for the deity or a landslide rumor? Undeniably another managerial task gone out of line. Who all believed that the place has wonderful control systems put in place by the state? Who all believed that God lives in the stones? Who all believed that thousands of people gathering on constricted mountainous tracks can never reduce to this fate? I am not sure of the adults who passed away, however I am certain that none of the children who died believed this.  As much as, they never would have believed in God, if not for their parents who, for the love of God took them to the exceptionally packed place. We are all in sorrow. But it’s time to also be in shame. 

That the state of the art when the legality of the patent comes for examination cannot be used with hindsight in order to correct shortages in the patent at the point when it was filed has stood the test in the courts once again. In Eli Lilly v Human Genome Sciences Inc, Hon’ble Justice Kitchen put down a body of principles which he held the UK courts should address when deciding if or not a given patent possessed industrial applicability. The rundown is lordly and commanding. Here is a copy:

-the court to construe the “indutrial applicability” provision of the Patents Act 1977 so that, so far as possible, it had the same effect as Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC).

-in the context of indutrial applicability, “industry” to be construed broadly. It included all manufacturing, extracting and processing activities of enterprises that were carried out continuously, independently and for commercial gain. “Industry” need not however have been conducted for profit — and a product which was shown to be useful to cure a rare disease could be considered capable of industrial application even if it had never been intended for use in trade at all.

- the skilled person had to be able to derive an invention’s industrial application from its description in the patent, read with the benefit of common general knowledge. Accordingly that description had to disclose a practical way of exploiting the invention in at least one field of industrial activity. This requirement had recently been re-formulated as an enquiry as to whether there was a sound and concrete basis for recognising that the contribution was (or was not) capable of leading to practical application in industry. Even so, it was still necessary to disclose, in definite technical terms, the purpose of the invention and the manner in which it was to be used to solve the given technical problem.

- there also had to be a real prospect of exploitation of the invention that could be derived directly from the specification, if it was not already obvious from the nature of the invention or the background art. This requirement could not be satisfied it what was described was merely an interesting research result that could yield an as-yet unidentified industrial application.

-the purpose of granting a patent was not to reserve an unexplored field of research for the applicant — nor was it to give the patentee unjustified control over others who were actively investigating in that area and who might eventually have found ways actually to exploit it.

-if a substance was disclosed and its function was essential for human health, its identification as having that function immediately suggested a practical application — but if its function was not known, or was incompletely understood, and no disease had been identified that was attributable to an excess or deficiency of it, and no other practical use was suggested for it, the requirement of industrial applicability was not satisfied.

-the use of a claimed invention in order to discover more about its own properties was not of itself an industrial application for the purposes of patentabiity.

-appliying all of these principles, HGS’s patent — however meritorious its discovery might have been — was invalid for lack of industrial applicability.

There can be three stages in man’s existence on earth. He may Survive and then possibly Live and then possibly Thrive. With at least 3000 Kilo calories per day for each person, we produce enough food for us all. Yet, millions die without food. We have not acted. When are we going to act? It’s difficult. We are busy. Busy in our Live stage. But are we really trying to live OR we are busy filling the gap, the gap between our Living and Thriving, always trying to get to the Thrive stage. And more than half of us will not be able to fill that gap, as evidenced time and again by Time itself, for folks who joined this race much before us. Without going into the subject of ‘even what if we are able to fill that gap’ and leaving the premise of readers’ dreams and ambitions untouched by my words, I doubt if the endeavor of filling the gap itself is worth it. I am not sure. However, I am sure we, even individually can fill at least a few hundred stomachs in our life span. OR fill our own stomachs a few million times more than required for its natural fill. Let’s not just Survive but Live. But let’s just not Live but also assist others Survive so that they could progress and start to Live. Each of us is an ocean of energy – LET’S not drown in ourselves. Decision is ours. Death is theirs. We have, but one life. let US DO something – WHATEVER we can, but not whenever we can. now.

Just to make this blog a little lighter, I will try to end my weekend writing by my opinions of the 2 movies I watched or tried watching this weekend:

1. Sarkaar Raaj -  Could not watch after 15 minutes. Some people never change and that is good. But Ramu, you please change.

2. Monsoon wedding – I loved it because of the reason it is an “it is” movie rather than an “it should” movie.