Peanut Butter and Patents

I keep meeting people in the intellectual property business who are surprised that Plumpy’nut received a patent in either the U.S. or European Union. Typically, they explain, patents are granted for inventions that are “non-obvious.” On the face of it, however, Plumpy’nut seems like glorified peanut butter. And it’s a rather obvious idea to give peanut butter to malnourished children.

But no one yet is willing to go “on the record” with such a pronouncement. So my search is still on for a recognized patent attorney or other expert who can take a look at Plumpy’nut story.

The other idea several folks have mentioned is finding out which countries do not have a patent on Plumpy’nut. (There’s apparently no such thing as an international patent. Patents are granted on a country-by-country basis.) It would be perfectly legal to make a peanut butter and dried milk concoction using the Plumpy’nut recipe in those countries where the patent does not exist.

Discover your inner Sherlock Holmes and conduct a search, talk to an expert you just met, visit with a librarian, etc. Spend as little as ten minutes or all day, if you want, following your clue.

If you learn something interesting that relates to Nutriset, Plumpy’nut, humanitarian feeding programs or patents, summarize what you have found in a comment to this post.

Other readers are then free to comment on the quality of your information, follow up your clue or add clues of their own. Authors of the best comments will want to become writers in their own right, adding posts of their own.

(For now, the process of becoming a writer–as opposed to a commenter–is pretty informal: just e-mail Christine at cgormanhealth[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Be sure to use your real name, give real contact information and say why you want to publish your own posts on the blog and what you think you can contribute. As the community grows, the process will undoubtedly evolve.)

All posts that suggest new resources or avenues of inquiry should be tagged with the “suggested leads” category.

As noted above, the best part of collaborative reporting–you put as much or as little effort into the project as you want. The experiment is to see if the sum of all these individual intellectual efforts will amount to something valuable–something that will help more malnourished kids get fed or that provides greater insight into the way the humanitarian business gets done.

Harvard professor Michael Sandel wonders if the neem story might have some bearing on patenting peanut-based foods for malnourished children. I asked Sandel about Nutriset after a talk he gave this evening at the Nieman Foundation.

At the turn of the 21st century, the European patent office revoked a patent it had granted on a fungicide derived from the neem tree, the source of many traditional agricultural products in India. In essence, the European patent office recognized that farmers had been using the seeds, oils and other parts of the neem tree for years to fight pests, blight and other agricultural problems. So the patent holders–in this case the US Department of Agriculture and W.R. Grace–were not entitled to the patent because they had not in fact created something novel.

Which brings up a few questions: Is there any previous history of using peanut butter mixes to fight starvation or treat malnourishment? If so, would that constitute what patent lawyers call “prior art”? And how many children would die of malnourishment before the challenge could finally be adjudicated? Related to that, how much money would have to be spent on the challenge and wouldn’t that money just be better spent buying the (patented) stuff and giving it to the kids?