ABSTRACT
The article evaluated the legal protection of new plant and animal varieties under intellectual property law. This issue has become a subject of increasing concerns to the international community. Hence, international and regional agreements have been entered into as well as national legislation enacted to address this sensitive subject of biological interventions. It was discovered in the study that though scientific propagation of plant and animal varieties is of ancient times, yet patent laws in some countries, including Nigeria, expressly prohibits the patentability of any variety of animal or plant or any essentially biological process for the production of animals or plants, not being a microbiological process or the products of such a process. The article concludes that though indisputably, ethical and moral questions will inevitably arise in the exploitation of biological interventions, nonetheless, the more fundamental question is how they should be addressed. This is because splicing morality provision into patent laws will result in an unstable fusion.
KEYWORDS: Animal Variety, Breeder’s Right, Intellectual Property Right, Patentability, Plant Variety, TRIPS Agreement.