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8 things you should know about patents on life: Dinyar Godrej gives the lowdown on some underhand activities - Keynote - Column
New Internationalist, Sept, 2002 by Dinyar Godrej
1 What's it alt about, Alfie?
In 1980 a paradigm shifted. Or rather it collapsed altogether.
Ananda Chakrabarty won a US Supreme Court case allowing him to patent a bacterium he had genetically engineered to digest oil. Suddenly a legal construct that had been designed to protect inventors' ideas from appropriation jumped over the not inconsiderable fence that separates the inanimate world from the sentient and animate. This however didn't seem to exercise the presiding judge unduly. He declared that the 'relevant distinction is not between animate and inanimate things but whether living products could be seen as human-made inventions'.
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And there's the nub. Reproduction aside, can human beings really claim to create life? Chakrabarty himself said that he 'simply shuffled genes, changing bacteria that already existed - it's like teaching your pet cat new tricks'.
Genetic engineering involves the juggling of pre-existing components of life. No new gene or genetic material is ever created, just different combinations. So if a genetically engineered organism reproduces, it does so of its own accord following a natural process. How then can it be owned?
In order to be patented an invention must fulfil three criteria -- it requires an inventive step (which is not obvious to someone skilled in the field), it must be novel and it must be useful. But patents on life usually fail the first two, if not all three. It would appear the criteria have been downgraded in many instances to simply possessing the technology to tamper with life and the ability to describe the extent of the tampering.
Chakrabarty's oil-chomping bacterium opened the floodgates in the US. Five years later the US Patent and Trademark Office allowed genetically modified (GM) plants, seeds and plant tissue to be patented. By 1987 animal patenting was permitted. Today human gene sequences, cell lines and stem cells are allowed (see over).
What all of this means is that corporate interests (and university research departments which are increasingly corporate funded) can corner life forms for the lifetime of a patent (usually 20 years) and have a monopoly over their exploitation.
2 What's fair game?
Patents on life actually represent ancient Western obsessions -- conquest and colonization. Except here science, in the deep pocket of corporate finance, seeks to subdue the natural world and venture boldly into the 'interior spaces' of genes and cell lines. (1) Human beings have no rights to their own genetic heritage -- after all, they did nothing to exploit their usefulness, claim some scientists.
On 26 June 2000, the world learnt that a draft of the entire human genome had been completed independently by two competing bodies. The publicly-funded Human Genome Project aimed to keep the data in the public domain, whilst the company Celera Genomics sought to license use of its data for a fat fee. The public consortium had been pushed into a race to complete the draft by Celera's bid. As John Sulston, who led the British arm of the Human Genome Project put it: 'We were in a position of responsibility... without us, the human genome would be privatized.'(2) But PE Biosystems, the company that launched Celera, also had other fish to fry. They were the suppliers of the sequencing equipment required by both sides. Within a year of Celera's formation, PE Biosystems had made sales of a cool $1 billion.
Proprietary databases of genetic information, whether of humans or of plants and animals, seek to enclose knowledge that belongs to us all. Currently just describing genetic, information and suggesting a use for it is enough for the grant of a patent not just on the information, but on the genetic material itself and any future uses of it. Patents on human genetic material number in their millions -- the human genome is already covered several times over by them, with numerous patents granted for the same stretches of DNA. (3) The variety of patents on life puts Pandora's box in the pale -- human cells, cell lines, gene sequences and fragments, plant genes, naturally occurring micro-organisms, transgenic plant and animal varieties, cloning techniques and cloned animals, stem cells and techniques to isolate and grow them are all up for grabs. But much simpler theft is involved as well.
3 Biopiracy
Natural resources known to indigenous peoples for centuries are easy plums for the biotechnology companies to pick. A remedy from India, where I grew up, comes to mind. The neem tree's anti-bacterial and insecticidal properties had over 80 patents slapped on them by eager US and Japanese corps, although at least one has been overturned. But these properties aren't news to anyone. My mother would mix neem twigs and leaves in with her store of wheat to keep the bugs off. Neem soap has been going for years -- especially popular with pustular teenagers on the subcontinent. And a good chew on a revoltingly bitter neem twig substitutes for brushing one's teeth for many a poor Indian.
