Two major milestones occurred in 1980. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a genetic engineer who had derived a strain of bacteria capable of eating crude oil, which made it useful in cleaning up oil spills. His application had been rejected by the Patent Office on the theory that you could not patent a living thing. But the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, that “a live, human-made micro-organism is patentable” if it is “a product of human ingenuity.”1 Also that year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which made it easier for universities to
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