DOW CHEMICAL U.S.A. 
TEXAS DIVISION 
FREEPORT. TEXAS 776*1 
September 13, 1976 
Dr. D. J. Kilian 
Occupational Health 
and Medical Research 
B-1222 Building 
I was very interested to read Dr. Fredrickson's letter about 
patent applications in the area of recombinant DNA. I have 
several thoughts as follows: 
1. It is my understanding that the purposes of the patent 
law are to encourage inventors to disclose their inventions 
rather than keeping them as trade secrets, and to provide the 
inventor with a legal monopoly for a limited period of time 
so that he has a chance to recover his costs before it is 
copied. 
Thus patents are very important to commercial enterprises. 
For example, in my experience, the Dow Agricultural Department 
would not invest in the development of a pesticide (which 
requires several million dollars) unless they had some patent 
rights, either through their own efforts or through purchase 
of those rights from someone else. 
2. There are several kinds of patents, including compound 
patents, process patents, and use patents. The most valuable 
patent is a compound patent wherein the owner controls all 
uses for the compound. However, someone else may discover 
a new use for the compound, and then neither one can use the 
compound for this use without agreement of the other. A 
process patent covers only a particular process, and someone 
else may invent an alternate, or even better process. 
I judge that at this point, any patent applications in the 
recombinant DNA area would be process patents, a way of doing 
it. It would not be possible to obtain a patent on insulin 
itself, but one could patent a new process for making or 
obtaining it. However, new compounds made by the recombinant 
process might be patented, or their use might be patented. 
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