This does seem to be a pretty decent area to provide intellectual property-based incentives for. The fundamental innovation here is intellectual -- it's the engineering of a new genetic code.

All of us are familiar with something similar -- engineering of new computer code.

It is often granted that computer code provides unique benefits worth protecting. I can certainly see why genetic engineering deserves similar protections.

That said, this is a fairly complicated piece of case law and I could definitely see how it could fall through the cracks in naively written legislation.