“How did the supremes know that he hadn’t simply selected ordinary soybean mutations for roundup resistance thus replicating the process (which can’t be patented) that Monsanto used to find the resistant strain in the first place?”
Its actually quite easy to show that the resistance was not naturally selected for by examining the sequence of the gene and the region around it.
Really? I would think that it could be done, but I'm not sure it would be easy. How would you do it? I would think that this would require very expensive gene sequencing machinery as well as a fair amount of manpower. And more to the point DID they do it? Or did they just assume that what he did was recapture monsanto's previous work (which is most likely)