Person Skilled in the Art in Synthetic Biology from Iraqi and Malaysian Perspectives

This article presents the problem of a person skilled in the field of synthetic biology. The person skilled in the art is one of the notions which have to be revisited due to the multidisciplinary nature of synthetic biology which involves numerous fields. The article studies this problem from the perspectives of Iraqi and Malaysian patent laws. First, it conceptualizes synthetic biology and person skilled in the art. The Iraqi and Malaysian attitudes regarding person skilled in the art are then addressed. Afterwards, the paper points out the multidisciplinary nature of synthetic biology. In its last part, it discusses the person skilled in synthetic biology and how patent offices and courts deal with this point. Finally, the authors submit that the use of a team of skilled persons to substitute for a single technician would render the obviousness test a subjective assessment dependent on the inventor. The level of non-obviousness would differ in similar cases simply because of the number of inventors. Consequently, the suggestion of having a hypothetical team instead of one person is irrelevant because skills that are attributed to the skilled notional person are not real skills. Thus, replacing him is easy, but the replacement would be fruitless because the skills attributed to a person or a team will be similar.