Your view on poop-as-a-pill

As the science behind fecal transplants advances, there's a nagging technical question with implications for the biotech industry: Should such products be regulated like patentable drugs, or should they be treated like run-of-the-mill donated blood?

Yesterday we asked readers, and the results were close. About 54 percent argued that the FDA should consider feces-derived treatments the same way it does injectable drugs, which is to say subject to patent exclusivity. The other 46 percent took the opposite view.

How things shake out will be superlatively important to the nascent field. A patent-protected product is more lucrative — and thus investable — than an open-source technology.