The first question is similar to asking, "How long is a string?" Arbitrarily long.
I think that "prior art" and "obviousness" claims for certain classes of manipulations should (in a world run by biologists) be useful. For example, if you discover New Gene X and manipulate its DNA to tag its protein product with a fluorescent protein, that's pretty damn obvious because that's what we do with every other protein.
I think that "prior art" and "obviousness" claims for certain classes of manipulations should (in a world run by biologists) be useful. For example, if you discover New Gene X and manipulate its DNA to tag its protein product with a fluorescent protein, that's pretty damn obvious because that's what we do with every other protein.