Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [137]
Biopiracy. This is the pejorative term applied to the private appropriation of public biological resources, particularly the patenting of indigenous plants for corporate profit at the expense of poor farmers in developing countries.18 For example, a Texas company obtained a patent for several lines of basmati rice, a staple grain consumed in India for millennia and an important source of income for that country. India requested a reexamination of the patent. Although protests eventually induced the Patent Office to refuse most of the company’s claims, the initial approval lent credence to the idea that U.S. companies were stealing native plants from developing countries. When Monsanto’s patents on transgenic soybeans raised similar alarms in China, the company said farmers in that country could use the technology without restriction. But why, ask critics, “should someone be entitled to transfer a resource from the public domain to the private domain?”19 Patenting is unquestionably political; its ostensible purpose is to promote useful inventions that benefit society. If so, according to one academic expert,
It is reasonable to question the extent to which plant and animal patents are likely to benefit society as a whole, particularly in an era when the Western patent system is being imposed internationally against the wishes of numerous countries. . . . If, on the other hand, the protection of the natural rights of inventors is the primary justification for patents, then it is perfectly reasonable to question the extent of those rights. In particular, it makes sense to consider what belongs in the genetic commons as discoveries and the natural heritage of humankind rather than industrial or government property.20
Animal Rights. The patenting of animals generates distrust for reasons of religion, ethics, and animal rights. Various organizations—animal-rights groups and others—believe that the genetic engineering of farm animals adversely affects family farmers, is cruel to animals, endangers living species, or is flatly unethical. Perhaps in response to such concerns, the Patent Office stopped issuing patents for transgenic animals in 1988. In 1993, it resumed processing of the 180 animal patent applications that had accumulated during the moratorium, but fewer companies were attempting to patent farm animals by that time, largely because persistent technical problems and costs had encouraged them to shift to more profitable areas of research. Lobbyists against animal patents such as Jeremy Rifkin, a leading critic of biotechnology, continue to object to Patent Office policies for reasons of philosophy and economic inequity: “We believe the gene pool should be maintained as an open commons, and should not be the private preserve of multinational companies. . . . This is the Government giving its imprimatur to the idea that there is no difference between a living thing and any inert object. . . . It’s the final assault on the sacred meaning of life and life process.”21 Mr. Rifkin helped organize a coalition of church groups representing 80 religious faiths and denominations to oppose patenting on the grounds that animals are creations of God, not of humans. Others also find the idea of patenting animals repugnant on moral, ethical, and religious grounds.22
“Terminator” Technology. No patent issue elicits greater distrust of the food biotechnology industry—and of its government regulators—than patent protection through “terminator” technology. As yet another irony of the politics of food biotechnology, the terminator was the work of a USDA government scientist who recognized that the insertion of certain genes and antibiotic-resistance marker sequences into plants could stop them from reproducing. When treated with a suitable antibiotic, these genes lead to the production of a protein that prevents seed germination. This trick prevents plants from cross-pollinating