How seriously should I take these HIV/AIDS patents?

[beacher]

I found these patents, but how can I tell how successful these methods are?
And I find it interesting that someone would patent the production of AIDS...what purpose would that be for?


United States Patent Office - Patent # 5,676,977
Method of curing AIDS with tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5676977.PN.&OS=PN/5676977&RS=PN/5676977



United States Patent Office - Patent #4,647,773
Method of continuous production of retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and pre-AIDS

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4647773.PN.&OS=PN/4647773&RS=PN/4647773

[freedom97]

The process for creating a known strain of HIV could be extremely useful in lab research.

If you cannot find anything in the news or journals about a product created by the company owning the patents, you can be pretty sure they are not particularly marketable products. Just because you get a patent on something doesn't make it worth anything. For example, you could (in theory) patent a medicine that cures the common cold, but has the nasty side-effect of fifty percent patient fatality rate. How many people would buy it? Yet, there's the patent, published for the world to see, in case anybody wants to try to build upon your invention for something more useful.

[jorel]

Some companies actually DO patent anything and everything. I worked on patents for two of the top five "volume producing" corporations, who were each being issued over 2,500 patents per year in the 1990s. There are also thousands of "dormant" patents for inventions that may some day become useful.

[scirwode]

anyone who feels they *may* have stumbled on something profitable will put a patent on the discovery just in case it takes off and sells so they will profit and no-one can steal it - in this case some sort of AIDS cure

The second one is probably just some scientific gobbledygook that a company wanted to safeguard from being stolen.

[wynn]

I found these patents, but how can I tell how successful these methods are?
And I find it interesting that someone would patent the production of AIDS...what purpose would that be for?


United States Patent Office - Patent # 5,676,977
Method of curing AIDS with tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystal devices

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5676977.PN.&OS=PN/5676977&RS=PN/5676977



United States Patent Office - Patent #4,647,773
Method of continuous production of retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and pre-AIDS

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4647773.PN.&OS=PN/4647773&RS=PN/4647773