‘1’ simply hovers between 0.5 and 1.5

WHAT is the meaning of one? It’s a question that has occupied the minds of the greatest thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria, who believed that the numeral one was God’s number and so the basis of all other numbers.

Two millennia later, in the august surroundings of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, three judges in the Court of Appeal last week also deliberated on the meaning of one.

They came to the conclusion that one does not necessarily mean one at all – because it can actually include anything greater than or equal to a half and less than oneand-a-half.

In a patent dispute between two pharmaceutical giants arguing over who owns the royalty rights to a lucrative wound-dressing solution, their lordships sat in judgment over an issue that would have tested the mettle of the finest mathematical logicians; and in the process coined a new legal definition of “one”.

ConvaTec, a global medical products company, and Smith & Nephew, a specialist in “advance wound management” which questioned a patent owned by ConvaTec on a wound dressing involving silver and a salt solution.

The ConvaTec patent covered any salt solution “between 1 percent and 25 percent of the total volume of treatment”. However, Smith and Nephew devised a competing product that used 0.77 percent concentration, bypassing, or so it believed, the ConvaTec patent.

Their lordships concluded that “one” includes anything greater or equal to 0.5 and less than 1.5 – much to the chagrin of Smith &Nephew, whose 0.77 now fell within the realm of ConvaTec’s patent.

One of the judges, Lord Justice Christopher Clarke, admitted that it may seem daft to suggest that 0.5 now falls between 1 and 25.

“To jump to that conclusion would, however, ignore the fact that figures, no less than words, may take their meaning from the context in which they are used,” he wrote in the final judgment. – The Independent on Sunday