![handle is hein.journals/bothnl29 and id is 1 raw text is: 29 Biotechnology Law Report 1 O u y
Number 1 (February 2010) O i a
© Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/b1Ir.2010.9992
Albert P. Halluin (1939-2010)
By HAROLD C. WEGNER
Albert P. Halluin, one of the nation's pioneer biotechnology patent lawyers, who helped shape the practice
in this key specialty area at the dawn of commercial interest in the field fueled by the Supreme Court decision
in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980) and a close friend to many of us in the global patent com-
munity, died February 19, 2010, in a single-plane accident.
Al was a pioneer in the patent practice world at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where he worked
closely with the emerging biotechnology group, and helped the American Intellectual Property Law Associa-
tion enter the field as the founding Chairman of its Biotechnology Practice Committee. Among many activi-
ties with that group, he joined with later AIPLA president Margaret A. Boulware to put on a seminar that fea-
tured Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis to discuss biotechnology patenting from an inventor's perspective.
Al started his career in 1965 as a Patent Examiner and then served in corporate positions in Chicago at Corn
Products and in New Jersey at Exxon before moving to the Bay Area, where he has lived and worked for the
past 30 years, first in corporate practice as Vice-President of Cetus and then in private practice, where he was
active until the time of his passing.
Al Halluin was much more than a biotechnology lawyer. As an avid musician, he recorded a pop hit before
going to college. He had a keen interest in aviation as a licensed pilot and always had a curiosity about tech-
nology. Indeed, he was himself an inventor whose exploits were chronicled in a story that pictured Al in the
New York Times (Lawrence M. Fisher, The Lawyer with a Patent, New York Times [June 16, 1991]). He was
a colleague of Nobel Laureate James D. Watson and helped him organize and lead two important conferences
on the interface of biotechnology patent law and science at Watson's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Al had a broader picture of the law beyond the technical side and became active in seeking to block the en-
croachment of the doctrine of international exhaustion into the area of patents; he pursued this endeavor as
amicus curiae in K Mart Corp. v. Cartier, Inc., 485 U.S. 176 (1988), an area of the law that continues in con-
troversy even to the present day in cases such as Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Omega, S.A., Supreme Court No.
08-1423.
By far his most important contribution was at Cetus, where he was at first the only executive to understand
Kary Mullis' breakthrough polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology. When the company president refused
to sanction development and patenting of the PCR technology because he flat out didn't believe the invention
would work, Halluin defied the entire executive suite and immediately filed a patent application, which helped
pave the way for development of Mullis' epic invention that ended up with a Nobel Prize. At Cetus, he worked
with three scientists each of whom was named Inventor of the Year.
Halluin resigned from Cetus in 1990 and for the past generation has been an active Bay Area biotechnol-
ogy practitioner. His active law firm practice continued to the day of his death in an aircraft accident while he
was on his way to his mountain retreat near Yosemite. He was a member of the Editorial Board of Biotech-
nology Law Report since the journal's founding.
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