A lot of companies became interested in biotechnology in the 1980s and 1990s, including some that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with biotech. Pam Ancona tells the story of a US-based chocolate company that suddenly became interested in the potential health benefits of some of the compounds that chocolate contains. Although compounds found in nature cannot be patented, the higher-ups at the company “wanted to try to protect what could be done with those compounds…You can’t patent the thing as it exists in nature, but you can patent a formulation or a method of treating somebody with [it]. There are ways to protect that type of idea…They were thinking that they might actually start an offshoot company, and it would all be about health and wellness and things like that.” Why would a chocolate company be suddenly interested in patenting formulations of beneficial compounds? “It doesn’t make any sense logically. Why would a chocolate company take money from its mainstay and funnel it into biotech? But why not?” As it turned out, one of the company founders “got sick, and they wanted to put their money to good use, and they thought that they had something that could be beneficial…It seems like biotech opened people’s eyes up to a world of things they hadn’t even considered yet. And a good way to do that, to get your foot in the door, is to file a patent application.”
