Anne, manager of the Bloomsbury branch of the ‘Tropical Tanz’ tanning salon chain, went on a trekking holiday in March 2023 to the Isle of Stark, just inside the Arctic Circle. She stayed in a little fishing village where she was intrigued to discover that everyone had a golden tan, despite there being very limited daylight and outside temperatures never rising above freezing. Anne asked Nils, a local, why this was and he explained that the secret was to be found in an age-old recipe, handed down through generations, for a tanning paste.

Nils offered to teach Anne the recipe, and explained how the oil of the krognia palm, a plant that grew exclusively in the hills of Stark, was extracted by mashing the leaves in warm water. The oil was then mixed with seal fat and honey and left to stand for three hours before being applied to the body. After 10 minutes it was washed off. Following a week of applications a golden tan developed. The only downside, Nils said, was that the paste had to be made daily as it only stayed active for 12 hours after mixing.

For the remainder of her holiday, Anne prepared and used the tanning paste daily and by the time she returned home she had an amazing golden tan. Before she left Stark, Nils gave Anne some cuttings of the krognia palm to take back to the UK.

Once back in the UK, Anne told her area manager, Mrs. Badcrumble, all about the tanning paste, and Mrs. Badcrumble suggested that they start trials of the product at Tropical Tanz. However, when Anne explained the recipe, Mrs. Badcrumble said that it probably still needed some work as using seal fat would not be popular with customers. She therefore told Anne that she could work on perfecting a mixture using the company’s research labs in London.

Over the next few months, Anne tried all sorts of fats. She often took the resultant mixtures home for her flatmate Kitty to try. None worked, and Anne was close to giving up when Kitty suggested that Anne try peanut butter as she had heard that it was good for your skin. On 2 August 2023, Anne came home to find Kitty brimming with excitement. Kitty had been using Anne’s most recent peanut-butter batch, batch 331, for about a week with no success, and had taken to keeping it overnight in the fridge. That morning, Kitty’s boyfriend, Don, had been feeling hungry and had mistaken batch 331 for pâté and had spread it on his toast and eaten it. Almost immediately, he had started turning a beautiful golden brown. Anne realised that this was the breakthrough she had been looking for and, swearing Kitty to secrecy, rushed to tell Mrs. Badcrumble.

Mrs. Badcrumble was delighted and, when Anne had gone, searched the internet and discovered that the krognia palm was known to contain large quantities of a chemical called Stainmeskin, a chemical used in the dyeing industry to stain leather brown. Stainmeskin had been suggested, amongst a wide class of other chemicals, as a possible base for a tanning solution in the late 1960s, but had been rejected due to its high toxicity. Mrs. Badcrumble concluded that there must have been an unknown reaction between the peanut butter and this chemical that somehow blocked its toxicity.

Kitty, meanwhile, was unable to contain her excitement, and rushed out to tell her friend Janet, a journalist for The Daily News. She explained the nature of the breakthrough but didn’t mention that Anne had sworn her to secrecy. She gave Janet the remainder of batch 331 and told her to try it. Two days later (on 4 August) Janet passed the jar on to her friend Liam to analyse. Liam’s report, completed on 5 August, disclosed that the active ingredient in batch 331 was a chemical called Tangonol. A reference work, Mahler’s International Chemical Handbook, states that Tangonol was briefly used during the early 1970s as an additive in marine paint to make it more hardwearing, but that its use was discontinued when it was discovered that it was very toxic to fish. A method of preparing Tangonol was disclosed in UK patent 1,042,207 (1968).

On 4 August, without telling Anne, Mrs. Badcrumble applied for a patent on a new form of tanning solution. Mrs. Badcrumble was named as sole inventor. The specification details the process and ends with the following claims:

Claim 1: A process for making a tanning solution whereby Stainmeskin, extracted from crushed vegetable matter, is mixed with peanut butter and honey, the resultant mixture being left to stand, refrigerated at between 2 and 7 degrees Celsius, for at least 2 hours before being consumed.

Claim 2: A substance for use in the tanning of skin, comprising Stainmeskin, peanut butter and honey.

On 6 August 2023, Janet published a newspaper article entitled “New Miracle Tan,” which explained all about how batch 331 had been made.

Advise Anne on:

(i) Whether the patent application is valid; and

(ii) (assuming it is valid) to whom it should be granted.