Court Opinion

ID: 9420102
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:58.607433+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:22.262065
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
My understanding of Bond’s contribution is that prior to his attempts, packages of mixed cultures of inoculants presumably applicable to two or more different kinds of legumes had from time to time been prepared, but had met with indifferent success. The reasons for failure were not understood, but the authorities had concluded that in general pure culture inoculants were alone reliable because mixtures were ineffective due to the mutual in*133hibition of the combined strains of bacteria. Bond concluded that there might be special strains which lacked this mutual inhibition, or were at all events mutually compatible. Using techniques that had previously been developed to test efficiency in promoting nitrogen fixation of various bacterial strains, Bond tested such efficiency of various mixtures of strains. He confirmed his notion that some strains were mutually compatible by finding that mixtures of these compatible strains gave good nitrogen fixation in two or more different kinds of legumes, while other mixtures of certain other strains proved mutually incompatible.
If this is a correct analysis of Bond’s endeavors, two different claims of originality are involved: (1) the idea that there are compatible strains, and (2) the experimental demonstration that there were in fact some compatible strains. Insofar as the court below concluded that the packaging of a particular mixture of compatible strains is an invention and as such patentable, I agree, provided not only that a new and useful property results from their combination, but also that the particular strains are identifiable and adequately identified. I do not find that Bond’s combination of strains satisfies these requirements. The strains by which Bond secured compatibility are not identified and are identifiable only by their compatibility.
Unless I misconceive the record, Bond makes no claim that Funk Brothers used the same combination of strains that he had found mutually compatible. He appears to claim that since he was the originator of the idea that there might be mutually compatible strains and had practically demonstrated that some such strains exist, everyone else is forbidden to use a combination of strains whether they are or are not identical with the combinations that Bond selected and packaged together. It was this claim that, as I understand it, the District Court *134found not to be patentable, but which, if valid, had been infringed.
The Circuit Court of Appeals defined the claims to “cover a composite culture in which are included a plurality of species of bacteria belonging to the general Rhizo-bium genus, carried in a conventional base.” 161 F. 2d 981, 983. But the phrase “the claims cover a composite culture” might mean “a particular composite culture” or “any composite culture.” The Circuit Court of Appeals seems to me to have proceeded on the assumption that only “a particular composite culture” was devised and patented by Bond, and then applies it to “any composite culture” arrived at by deletion of mutually inhibiting strains, but strains which may be quite different from Bond’s composite culture.
The consequences of such a conclusion call for its rejection. Its acceptance would require, for instance in the field of alloys, that if one discovered a particular mixture of metals, which when alloyed had some particular desirable properties, he could patent not merely this particular mixture but the idea of alloying metals for this purpose, and thus exclude everyone else from contriving some other combination of metals which, when alloyed, had the same desirable properties. In patenting an alloy, I assume that both the qualities of the product and its specific composition would need to be specified. The strains that Bond put together in the product which he patented can be specified only by the properties of the mixture. The District Court, while praising Bond’s achievement, found want of patentability. The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judgment of the District Court by use of an undistributed middle — that the claims cover a “composite culture” — in the syllogism whereby they found patentability.
It only confuses the issue, however, to introduce such terms as “the work of nature” and the “laws of nature.” *135For these are vague and malleable terms infected with too much ambiguity and equivocation. Everything that happens may be deemed “the work of nature,” and any patentable composite exemplifies in its properties “the laws of nature.” Arguments drawn from such terms for ascertaining patentability could fairly be employed to challenge almost every patent. On the other hand, the suggestion that “if there is to be invention from such a discovery, it must come from the application of the law of nature to a new and useful end” may readily validate Bond’s claim. Nor can it be contended that there was no invention because the composite has no new properties other than its ingredients in isolation. Bond’s mixture does in fact have the new property of multi-service applicability. Multi-purpose tools, multivalent vaccines, vitamin complex composites, are examples of complexes whose sole new property is the conjunction of the properties of their components. Surely the Court does not mean unwittingly to pass on the patentability of such products by formulating criteria by which future issues of patent-ability may be prejudged. In finding Bond’s patent invalid I have tried to avoid a formulation which, while it would in fact justify Bond’s patent, would lay the basis for denying patentability to a large area within existing patent legislation.