Lehman irked by patent ploy

WASHINGTON - Anti-biotechnology activists created a new hobbyhorse to ride in their crusade to turn the public against the industry, filing a U.S. patent application on human-animal chimeras. Although the general media rose to the bait with stories depicting the creation of ape-human creatures, the reality is likely to be far more subtle.

The patent, filed last December by biotech critics Jeremy Rifkin and Stuart Newman, claims the "method of creating an embryo with a mixture of human and non-human cells and the resulting embryo," according to Pat Coyne, an attorney at Collier, Shannon, Rill and Scott in Washington who handled legal aspects of the filing...