the invention is debilitating and even deadly. See U.S. Patent No. 4,940,658, col. 1, ll.
32-40 (“Accurate and early diagnosis of cobalamin and folate deficiencies . . . is
important because these deficiencies can lead to life-threatening hematologic
abnormalities . . . . Accurate and early diagnosis of cobalamin deficiency is especially
important because it can also lead to incapacitating and life-threatening
neuropsychiatric abnormalities.”). Before the invention featured in Lab Corp., medical
science lacked an affordable, reliable, and fast means to detect this debilitating
condition. Denial of patent protection for this innovation—precisely because of its
elegance and simplicity (the chief aims of all good science)—would undermine and
discourage future research for diagnostic tools. Put another way, does not Patent Law
wish to encourage researchers to find simple blood tests or urine tests that predict and
diagnose breast cancers or immunodeficiency diseases? In that context, this court
might profitably ask whether its decisions incentivize research for cures and other
important technical advances. Without such attention, this court inadvertently advises
investors that they should divert their unprotectable investments away from discovery of
“scientific relationships” within the body that diagnose breast cancer or Lou Gehrig’s
disease or Parkinson’s or whatever.
IV
In sum, this court today invents several circuitous and unnecessary tests. It
should have merely noted that Bilski attempts to patent an abstract idea. Nothing more
was needed. Instead this opinion propagates unanswerable questions: What form or
amount of “transformation” suffices? When is a “representative” of a physical object
sufficiently linked to that object to satisfy the transformation test? (e.g., Does only vital
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