The BNA had a nice article summing up the recent roundtable on Mayo v. Prometheus that was held at George Washington University last week. Retired Chief Judge Paul Michel of the Federal Circuit was one of the speakers. He is quoted as saying:
[I] didn’t think it was a close call at all. I felt that it was easy passage through Section 101. But the Supreme Court’s ruling is attitudinally a throwback to pre-Chakrabarty cases like Gottschalk v. Benson and Parker v. Flook. It presents a vague standard. How are the more than 7,000 patent examiners and the thousands of patent attorneys and judges going to apply this? It’s going to be chaos unless the Supreme Court reworks this territory. It’s most unfortunate.
While it is too bad that Chief Judge Michel has retired from the CAFC, it is nice that he is now free and willing to speak his mind.