Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/11pdf/10-1150.pdf
Page Number: 15.0

Cite as:  566 U. S. ____ (2012) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

light  of  the  correlations.  To  put  the  matter  more  suc­
cinctly,  the  claims  inform  a  relevant  audience  about 
certain laws of nature; any additional steps consist of well­
understood, routine, conventional activity already engaged 
in  by  the  scientific  community;  and  those  steps,  when
viewed as a whole, add nothing significant beyond the sum
of  their  parts  taken  separately.    For  these  reasons  we 
believe  that  the  steps  are  not  sufficient  to  transform  un­
patentable  natural  correlations  into  patentable  applica­
tions of those regularities. 

B 
1 
A  more  detailed  consideration  of  the  controlling  prece­
dents  reinforces  our  conclusion.  The  cases  most  directly 
on point are Diehr and Flook, two cases in which the Court 
reached opposite conclusions about the patent eligibility of 
processes  that  embodied  the  equivalent  of  natural  laws. 
The Diehr process (held patent eligible) set forth a method
for molding raw, uncured rubber into various cured, mold­
ed  products.  The  process  used  a  known  mathematical
equation,  the  Arrhenius  equation,  to  determine  when
(depending  upon  the  temperature  inside  the  mold,  the
time the rubber had been in the mold, and the thickness of 
the rubber) to open the press.  It consisted in effect of the 
steps  of:  (1)  continuously  monitoring  the  temperature  on 
the  inside  of  the  mold,  (2)  feeding  the  resulting  numbers 
into a computer, which would use the Arrhenius equation 
to continuously recalculate the mold-opening time, and (3) 
configuring  the  computer  so  that  at  the  appropriate  mo­
ment  it  would  signal  “a  device”  to  open  the  press.    Diehr, 
450 U. S., at 177–179. 

The  Court  pointed  out  that  the  basic  mathematical
equation,  like  a  law  of  nature,  was  not  patentable.  But 
it  found  the  overall  process  patent  eligible  because  of 
the way the additional steps of the process integrated the