The patents on transgenic seeds are preventing farmers from saving seeds without paying royalties to the companies. As more and more seed companies are being bought up by the corporations, this introduces an effective seed monopoly that will marginalise family farmers all over the world and destroy agricultural biodiversity. Patents on all microorganisms isolated or identified. These patents would have included any microorganism isolated from Yellowstone Park in the US, for example, subject to an agreement which was subsequently successfully challenged by The Edmonds Institute on behalf of civil society. Patents on nuclear-transplant cloning and other in vitro reproductive techniques, and organisms resulting from those techniques.
Examples are the nuclear-transplant technique that produced Dolly.
This patent actually extends to the cloning of human beings. The status of the patentability of viruses needs to be discussed here, as viruses are not automatically included as microbiological. Inventions which concern plants or animals shall be patentable if the technical feasilibity of the invention is not confined to a particular plant or animal variety. The human body, at the various stages of its formation and development, and the simple discovery of one of its elements, including the sequence or partial sequence of a gene, cannot constitute patentable inventions. An element isolated from the human body or otherwise produced by means of a technical process, including the sequence or partial sequence of a gene, may constitute a patentable invention, even if the structure of that element is identical to that of a natural element.