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GIS US YER GENES
I've been reading again. And when I reads, I thinks. And when I thinks. I blogs. And when I get a hold of some stupid little thingy, I beats it like a dead horse. (Sorry about that) We have all come to the understanding that with the new unbridled growth in technology, there comes many a downside. Technology is almost always meant to make things easier, and in many cases it does. But with these new breakthroughs come various downsides that sometimes ends up making you wonder if it was all really worth it or not. I just read about one of the downsides in the field of Biotechnology. Seems greed again has got some legal minds working overtime with this one.
When a Biotech company isolates a gene in a living or once living entity that may cause a specific outcome or behaviour, it is now recognised legally as the 'inventor' of said gene and can register it's findings and then work exclusively on that gene, effectively blocking out any other firms with the same inclination. This is known as 'Bio-prospecting'. What a quaint little term. Although these laws are basically international, it is far more prevelant in the United States. It used to be so that you could only patent things after you had come to an effective solution; correcting the defect in the gene or showing how it can be altered to achieve the desired outcome. Hence many companies still work on the cure for TB or cancer but any new great killers will have to wait their turn. As a result, these new laws tend to delay finding much needed cures for the sake of one company being able to secure future profits and relaxing the timetable for cures.
But as if that wasn't getting a bit nit-fucking-picky, a newly invented law called 'Sovereign Enclosure' now allows countries to lay claim to any raw genetic resources within their bounderies forcing these Bio-prospectors to agree to share their future profits with the government of said country, long before any discoveries are even, well, discovered. Now how fucking crafty is that? It's like your landlord saying, "You realise, of course, when you've finished with that novel you've been writing in your office, which is my property, I'll be expecting regular royalty checks from you?" And if that isn't enough, your local county and city governments get to take a cut of your work as well. And if it comes from a specific area in which indigenous communities may and/or have existed, they too are seeing their pound of flesh syphoned from your post office account. In a word, hyper-ownership.
So as before, you can own a cow or sheep, but the government, and a host of others, now owns their genes. Personally, I find this well beyond nonsensical. I really wish people who can think so deeply about issues would put that creativity to work on actually helping the greater good than just being lawyers. I only wish I had invented greed. Then I could have patented it and been the richest person to ever have lived. And you just know that we'll all die from whatever it is these firms may eventually be working on long before this mess gets sorted out.
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To date 5 Comment(s)
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(3.2.06 12:22)
That is beyond ludicrous. And well beyond theft/piracy ...
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(3.2.06 13:40)
"And when I get a hold of some stupid little thingy, I beats it like a dead horse"
*titters*
that soudns dirty!
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(6.2.06 14:38)
but then again, imagine some massive biotech company based in the US starts patenting genes of a remote people who live in some small village in some pocket of Africa - this does ensure that the biotechs don't completely take advantage of these remote tribes, and will, instead, have to share out some of their megabucks to their , well, source. It is a shame that it goes to a government, though - since governments do not always have their people's interests at heart. Look at how tribes in South America or Borneo are treated for having the bad manners to living in prime loggable parts of the rainforest
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(7.2.06 08:34)
Cookie, Very altruistic in thought but very dodgy in practise as virtually all remote tribes have little or no legal representation in the scheme of things. If something like this were to happen, the odds of the tribe actually recieving or seeing any financial benefits would be slim to none. Corrupt governments and regional war lords would threaten the tribe or worse yet, eliminate them and place fake tribesmen in just long enough to establish a money laundering system into their own holdings. (Remember, I am the King of Pessimism) Interesting you should mention South America because every country with a rain forest saw fit to establish these laws nearly as soon as they were introduced.
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