ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between pollution and patentability by analyzing how arguments regarding genetic pollution play out in legal cases impinging upon the legal protection of genetic patents. For Common Law only allocates unrestricted property over the admixture if one of the parties is found guilty of “willfully intermixing” the other’s domain. Pollution as a practical problem, and as an object of intense scientific controversies, was ultimately deemed irrelevant to the Court’s reasoning, and to patent infringement cases more generally. Monsanto v. Percy Schmeiser is the most prominent case pitting claims of ‘genetic pollution’ against the validity of patents over genetically engineered organisms, and the precariousness of the hold of patents over living matter. Monsanto v. Schmeiser offers a landmark example of the rhetoric and reasoning through which property rights over the seed are being contested.
