15) is a United States federal law spurred by the work of Luther Burbank and the nursery industry.
Whereas human-made machines (and their inventive parts) can be described precisely, similarly accurate description is not possible for living things: even if a complete DNA sequence in every chromosome is known, it is not possible with modern technology to establish the limits of the DNA variation with the accuracy required for composition-of-matter claims.
[4] The scope of the rights offered by the Plant Patent Act was arguably curtailed by the US Court of Appeals decision in 1995, Imazio Nursery Inc. v. Dania Greenhouses, 36 U.S.P.Q.
The legislation did not receive much popular attention until several decades later, during the development of plant breeders' rights through the UPOV 1961 treaty and the enactment of the US Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970, which coincided with broader critiques of intellectual property and its relationship to human health, food security, and the environment.
[7] Many activists and scholars have suggested that there is a connection between plant patent protection and the loss of biodiversity,[8] although such claims are contested.