High-tech Piracy
(Page 3 of 5)
March/April 1996
By Special to Utne Reader--Andrew Kimbrell
Merck is not alone in its corporate ownership of microorganisms. Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb both have more bacteria and fungi holdings than Merck. Each year the drug industry spends billions searching the world's soils for valuable microorganisms.
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The biopirates are also on the lookout for profitable, patentable plants. In one remarkable example, several Northern corporations, including W.R. Grace, have been granted more than 50 U.S. patents on the neem tree of India--and not only on the tree, but also on the indigenous knowledge about its many uses.
In another act of biopiracy, two drugs derived from the rosy periwinkle--vincristine and vinblastine--earn $100 million annually for Eli Lilly. The plant is indigenous to the rainforest of Madagascar, and the country has received nothing in return.
Pharmaceuticals are among the most lucrative areas for the international biopirates: Some 25 percent of U.S. prescriptions are filled with drugs whose active ingredients are derived from plants. Sales of these plant-based drugs amounted to some $4.5 billion in 1980 and $15.5 billion in 1990. In Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States, the market value for both prescription and over-the-counter drugs based on plants is estimated to be in excess of $70 billion. Transnational companies know where to find the plants: Well over 50 percent of the world's estimated 250,000 plant species are in tropical rainforests. Only a small fraction of them have been investigated as a source of potential new drugs, and the rapid destruction of tropical forests has hastened corporations' screening, appropriation, and patenting processes.
The mounting intensity of the biopirates' assault on Third World genetic resources can also be seen in the enormous pressures placed on governments by agricultural and drug companies to pass the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and other international trade structures, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, that cement the right of private actors to patent the resources and indigenous knowledge of the Third World. The result is an ever-increasing use of patenting and licensing agreements by transnational corporations to secure a monopoly over valuable genetic materials that can be developed into profitable drugs and energy sources.
The New Vampires
The biopirates are interested not only in microbes and plants, but also in the very bodies of indigenous peoples. For decades the United States and other industrialized countries have been buying the blood of the poor in the Third World and selling it on the open market. Now scientists and researchers are racing to locate, identify, and find commercial uses for human genes from various indigenous populations. The search for valuable human genetic material is fueled by the fact that human genes and cells are now patentable. Relying on the Chakrabarty decision, over the past decade the U.S. Patent Office has allowed patents on human genes, cells, and cell lines. The lure of patent profits is leading a growing army of international gene hunters hoping to find potentially profitable genetic material to collect and analyze blood and other materials from Third World peoples. For example, in May 1989, researchers took blood samples from 24 people from the Hagahai people of Papua, New Guinea. The patent application describes the Hagahai as "a 260-member hunter-horticulturist group" that inhabits New Guinea's Madang Province. A cell line developed from the Hagahai might be valuable in diagnosing adult leukemia and chronic degenerative neurologic disease. Another patent claim filed on behalf of the U.S. government involves a human cell line derived from a 40-year-old woman and a 58-year-old man, both of the Solomon Islands; this cell line, too, may be useful in diagnosing disease. In neither case were the people asked for their consent, nor were their traditions and values considered.
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