Refers to 35 USC §101, the provision of the US Patent Law that established what is patentable, and inter alia, the US Novelty Requirement. It reads:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
In recent decades there have been repeated cases addressing whether §101 extends to live, human-made micro-organism (Charabarty), business method and software patents (Bilsky and Alice) which will likely continue to be an occasional feature of the Supreme Court docket.