Commodity Supply and Extraterritorial Patent Infringement in Life Technologies V. Promega

American patent law grants inventors the exclusive right, within U.S. territory, to make, sell, use, and import their patented inventions. In response to attempts to circumvent the right by making the components of an invention within the U.S. and exporting them for assembly abroad, Congress passed 35 U.S.C. § 271(f), prohibiting “suppl[ying] . . . from the United States all or a substantial portion of the components of a patented invention . . . to actively induce the combination of such components outside of the United States . . . .” Petitioner Life Technologies supplied one commodity component of a patented five-component genetic testing kit from the U.S. The Federal Circuit held them liable under § 271(f), upholding a jury verdict and allowing that one component could be a “substantial portion of the components.” The Supreme Court reversed, reading § 271(f) not to reach the supply of a single component. This ruling will help to preserve suppliers’ confidence in their freedom to ship commodities overseas without being liable for infringement

Embryos as Patients? Medical Provider Duties in the Age of CRISPR/Cas9

The CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering platform is the first method of gene editing that could potentially be used to treat genetic disorders in human embryos. No past therapies, genetic or otherwise, have been intended or used to treat disorders in existent embryos. Past procedures performed on embryos have exclusively involved creation and implantation (e.g., in-vitro fertilization) or screening and selection of already-healthy embryos (e.g., preimplantation genetic diagnosis). A CRISPR/Cas9 treatment would evade medical malpractice law due to the early stage of the intervention and the fact that it is not a treatment for the mother. In most jurisdictions, medical professionals owe no duty to pre-viable fetuses or embryos as such, but will be held liable for negligent treatment of the mother if the treatment causes injury to a born-alive child. This issue brief discusses the science of CRISPR/Cas9, the background legal status of human embryos, and the case for considering genetically engineered embryos as patients for purposes of medical malpractice law

The right wing of the LEFT airplane

The NASA Leading-Edge Flight Test (LEFT) program addressed the environmental issues which were potential problems in the application of Laminar Flow Control (LFC) to transport aircraft. These included contamination of the LFC surface due to dirt, rain, insect remains, snow, and ice, in the critical leading-edge region. Douglas Aircraft Company designed and built a test article which was mounted on the right wing of the C-140 JetStar aircraft. The test article featured a retractable leading-edge high-lift shield for contamination protection and suction through perforations on the upper surface for LFC. Following a period of developmental flight testing, the aircraft entered simulated airline service, which included exposure to airborne insects, heavy rain, snow, and icing conditions both in the air and on the ground. During the roughly 3 years of flight testing, the test article has consistently demonstrated laminar flow in cruising flight. The experience with the LEFT experiment was summarized with emphasis on significant test findings. The following items were discussed: test article design and features; suction distribution; instrumentation and transition point reckoning; problems and fixes; system performance and maintenance requirements

Derivation of near-optimal pump schedules for water distribution by simulated annealing

The scheduling of pumps for clean water distribution is a partially discrete non-linear problem with many variables. The scheduling method described in this paper typically produces costs within 1% of a linear program-based solution, and can incorporate realistic non-linear costs that may be hard to incorporate in linear programming formulations. These costs include pump switching and maximum demand charges. A simplified model is derived from a standard hydraulic simulator. An initial schedule is produced by a descent method. Two-stage simulated annealing then produces solutions in a few minutes. Iterative recalibration ensures that the solution agrees closely with the results from a full hydraulic simulation

Incorporation of cytochrome oxidase into cardiolipin bilayers and induction of nonlamellar phases.

Cytochrome oxidase from beef heart has been lipid-substituted with beef heart cardiolipin. The lipid phase behavior and protein aggregation state of the reconstituted complexes have been studied with 31P NMR, freeze-fracture electron microscopy, and saturation-transfer ESR of the spin-labeled protein. In the absence of salt, the lipid has a lamellar arrangement, and the protein is integrated and uniformly distributed in the membrane vesicles and undergoes rapid rotational diffusion. The presence of the protein stabilizes the cardiolipin lamellar phase against salt-induced transitions to the inverted hexagonal phase. The threshold salt concentration becomes higher and the extent of conversion becomes lower with decreasing lipid:protein ratio. In high salt, lamellar-phase lipid with integrated protein coexists with hexagonal-phase lipid free of protein, and the rotational diffusion of the protein is drastically reduced as a result of the high packing density

The design of a numerically controlled drilling system using fluidic elements 1966/7

This report outlines the aims of the project and procedures used to bring it to a successful conclusion. It also summarises the results of an investigation into the parameters which govern the specification of a numerically controlled point to point drilling machine

Tailoring explicit time-marching schemes to improve convergence characteristics

Multi-stage time-stepping schemes, tailored to chosen spatial-differencing operators, are derived and tested. The schemes are constructed to give optimal damping of the high-frequency waves. They are ideal for use with multi-grid acceleration. The concept of characteristic time-stepping, necessary for the extension of the scalar analysis to systems of equations, is presented. The schemes show a marked improvement over Runge-Kutta schemes