A federal review of Wisconsin’s embryonic stem-cell patents won’t question what everyone concedes: that UW-Madison scientist James Thomson was the first to grow a colony of the cells from humans in a lab.
Instead, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s review of three patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation will ask if Thomson’s accomplishment in 1998 was “obvious” because other scientists had done similar work in species such as mice and pigs.
Office of Strategic Communication