How do you patent indigenous knowledge? Most pharmaceutical companies have stopped trying.
It’s easy to think of indigenous tribes as backwards and ignorant, but they know a lot of amazing things that we don’t. Instead of English Lit or Poli Sci, they get fast-tracked into a far more challenging major: How To Thrive In The World’s Most Savage Environments. The producers of Survivor ought to add a local to the next series — they’d win every immunity challenge, clean the Westerners’ collective clocks, and probably still gain some weight while they were at it.
In my travels I’ve seen an Australian aborigine, a Peruvian Amazon guide, and a Ugandan translator casually demonstrate that where I saw blank and forbidding jungle, they saw a hardware store, arsenal, pantry and pharmacy. Need some soap, or disinfectant, or poison, or polish, or a snack? Mother Nature can and will provide.
So: on one side of the rich-poor divide, you have a small and diminishing group of tribes who happen to be the last repository of thousands of years of collective botanical research. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies around the world are on a relentless hunt for biologically active compounds they can turn into lucrative drugs. Should be a match made in heaven, right? I wish.
Half of all today’s drugs are based on chemicals from natural sources. Consider the Rosy Periwinkle, a flower found only in Madagascar. In the 1950s, researchers intrigued by the plant’s role in traditional medicines discovered, among many other compounds, vinblastine and vincristine, which are widely used today to treat cancer. Worldwide sales of Rosy Periwinkle are worth approximately $150 million a year — but virtually none of the money goes to Madagascar.
“Biopiracy!” cry the advocates for poor countries. “Bioprespecting,” retorts Big Pharma. There’s not much moral high ground on either side. The first group misrepresents patents on processes as patents on plants, and are disingenuous about who exactly is going to shell out the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to develop a new drug, in the absence of patent protection. Meanwhile, the drug companies pretend they spend half their money on R&D instead of marketing , try to claim patents for which there are clear prior art, and seem to see nothing wrong with using indigenous knowledge without paying for it.
The 1992 Convention for Biological Diversity was supposed to bridge this divide by establishing the principle that research would be encouraged and its benefits shared. It has been ratified by all the countries in the world except for Andorra, Iraq, the Vatican, Somalia, and… oh, the United States of America. And it has completely failed. Since 1992 there have been reams of other disputes, not all of which involved American companies: WR Grace and the Indian neem tree, Phytopharm and the Kalahari hoodia cactus, etc. What most have in common is an almost hysterical disregard for reality on all sides.
Understandably, neither scientists nor pharmaceutical companies have much appetite for lawsuits and controversies — so many have simply stopped trying to use indigenous knowledge at all, on the grounds that it’s a) unpatentable b) more trouble than it’s worth. Instead they’re using other ingenious approaches; for example, Canadian graduate student Julie Helson, at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, hit on the idea of examining plants favoured by brightly-coloured insects, which tend to be toxic to predators, and get those active toxins from the plants they eat. The initial results are highly promising.
Still, it’s disconcerting that even the STRI — who directly employ many Panamanians, fund fellowships for Latin American citizens, and will happily give a percentage of any income from new medicines they discover to Panama — are leery of utilizing indigenous knowledge. That rich store of thousands of years of collective knowledge is fading away fast, just as pharmaceutical researchers are going out of their way not to use it. Everybody is losing, even the lawyers, and my engineer’s sense of efficiency is highly offended. Surely there has to be a better way?
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Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
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