to what you want. It's especially appealing in light of the potentially huge profits that can go to truly successful technologies. While researching this topic, I looked through only a handful of the hundreds of patents for biotechnology "inventions" that companies have rushed to file in recent years in order to stake out their claims in this new territory. It is standard form in patents to claim rights to as big an area as possible, and many companies promise much from little, leaving it to the future to develop ways of applying the scrap of knowledge they reveal.

Take one patent, no worse than others, which announces the discovery of cellulose-chewing amoebas. Amoebas are familiar to most people as the microscopic, jelly-like specks they observed flowing across microscope slides in science classes. Common in both soil and water, most amoebas feed on bacteria, decaying plant and animal matter, or microscopic algae. In the recently filed patent, researchers describe species of marine amoebas that can feed on the cellulose cell walls of seaweeds. They propose that this habit might have several applications in environmental biotechnology.

The amoebas were shown to thrive on the cellulose in seaweed simply by confining them with seaweed as their sole source of food. In addition, the researchers developed a mutant amoeba capable of degrading other large, stable molecules, including polyvinyl chloride (PVC, a type of plastic). These discoveries were presumably patented in the hope that cellulose- and plastic-eating amoebas might one day make money for someone. The patent application speaks glowingly of the microorganisms' potential for reducing problems of plastic accumulation in the environment.