[Mb-civic] Old but not...

[Ian]

I found this among my files just now.  Although the article is dated (late 1995), the subject is not: it is just as relevant - and scary - now as it was then.  It is a little lengthy, but worth the read...

Peace.

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"The top ten agrochemical companies control 81 percent of the $29 billion global agrochemical market.  Ten life-science companies control 37 percent of the $15 billion global seed market.  The world's top ten pharmaceutical firms control 47 percent of the $197 billion pharmaceutical market.  Ten firms control 43 percent of the $15 billion veterinary pharmaceuticals market.  Topping the life-science list are ten transnational food and drink companies, whose sales exceeded $211 billion in 1995."



Concerning the Patenting of Human Tissue, Organs and Body Parts

 

Adapted from an Article by Jeremy Rifkin,

President, Foundation on Economic Trends

 

            The concerns of critics came alive in 1993, when the Rural Advancement Foundation International, a nongovernmental organization, discovered that the U.S. government had sought both U.S. and international patents on a virus derived from the cell of a 26-year-old Guaymi Indian woman from Panama.  A researcher from the National Institutes of Health had taken a blood sample from the woman and developed a cell line.  The Guaymi cell line was of particular interest to N.I.H. researchers because members of this remote Indian community carry a unique virus that stimulates the production of antibodies that scientists believe might be useful in AIDS and leukemia research.  Upon learning about the patent application, representatives of the Guaymi General Congress in Panama waged a public protest.  Isidro Acosta, president of the Congress, said at the time that he was shocked that an august scientific body like the N.I.H. could so wantonly violate the genetic privacy of his tribe and that the U.S. government, without advising the Guaymi of its intentions, could then seek to patent a genetic trait of the Guaymi and profit from their biological inheritance in the global marketplace: "I never imagined people would patent plants and animals.  It's fundamentally immoral, contrary to the Guaymi view of nature, and our place in it.  To patent human material...to take human DNA and patent its products...that violates the integrity of life itself, and our deepest sense of morality."  The public protest forced the U.S. government to withdraw its patent application.

 

            The controversy over patenting genes from indigenous peoples flared again, however, several months later when the U.S. government filed two additional patent claims in the United States and Europe for cell lines taken from citizens of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.  When the government of the Solomon Islands issued a protest, then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown responded curtly:

 

            "Under our laws, as well as those of many other countries, subject matter relating to human cells is patentable and there is no provision for considerations relating to the sources of the cells that may be the subject of a patent application."

 

            In March 1995, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for the Papua New Guinea Human T-lymphotrophic virus (HTLV-1) to the Department of Health and Human Services, making it the first human cell line from an indigenous population to be patented.  Angry at the U.S. action, a group of South Pacific island nations prepared a joint proposal and communique that would make their sovereign space a "patent-free zone."  The United States quietly dropped the patent claim in 1996.

 

            The concentration of power is impressive.  The top ten agrochemical companies control 81 percent of the $29 billion global agrochemical market.  Ten life-science companies control 37 percent of the $15 billion global seed market.  The world's top ten pharmaceutical firms control 47 percent of the $197 billion pharmaceutical market.  Ten firms control 43 percent of the $15 billion veterinary pharmaceuticals market.  Topping the life-science list are ten transnational food and drink companies, whose sales exceeded $211 billion in 1995.



            Foreign nationals aren't the only ones whose cell lines are being patented by commercial companies in the United States.  In a precedent-setting case in California, an Alaska businessman named John Moore found his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by U.C.L.A. and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation.  Moore had been diagnosed as having a rare cancer and underwent treatment at U.C.L.A.  An attending physician and university researcher discovered that Moore's spleen tissue produced a blood protein that facilitates the growth of white blood cells that are valuable anti-cancer agents.  The university created a cell line from Moore's spleen tissue and obtained a patent on its "invention" in 1984. The cell line is estimated to be worth $3 billion.

 

            Moore subsequently sued the University of California, claiming a property right over his own tissue.  In 1990 the California Supreme Court ruled against Moore, holding that he had no property right over his own body tissues.  Human body parts, the court argued, could not be bartered as a commodity in the marketplace.  However, the court did say that the "inventors" had a responsibility to inform Moore of the commercial potential of his tissue and, for that reason alone, had breached their fiduciary responsibility and might be liable for some kind of monetary damage.  Still, the court upheld the primary claim of the university that the cell line itself, while not the property of Moore, could justifiably be claimed as the property of U.C.L.A.  The irony of the decision was captured by Judge Allen Broussard in his dissenting opinion.  He wrote that:

 

            "the majority's rejection of plaintiff's conversion cause of action does not mean that body parts may not be bought and sold for research or commercial purpose or that no private individual or entity may benefit economically from the fortuitous value of plaintiff's diseased cells.  Far from elevating these biological materials above the marketplace, the majority's holding simply bars plaintiff, the source of the cells, from obtaining the benefit of the cell's value, but permits defendants, who allegedly obtained the cells from plaintiff by improper means, to retain and exploit the full economic value of their ill-gotten gains free of...liability."

 

            The extraordinary implications of privatizing the human body - parceling it out in the form of intellectual property to commercial institutions - are illustrated quite poignantly in the case of a patent awarded by the European Patent Office to a U.S. company named Biocyte.  The patent gives the firm ownership of all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of a newborn child and are being used for any therapeutic purposes.  The patent is so broad that it allows this one company to refuse the use of any blood cells from the umbilical cord to any individual or institution unwilling to pay the patent fee.  Blood cells from the umbilical cord are particularly important for marrow transplants, making it a very valuable commercial asset.  It should be emphasized that this patent was awarded simply because Biocyte was able to isolate the blood cells and deep-freeze them.  The company made no change in the blood itself.  Still, the company now possesses commercial control over this part of the human body.

 

              A similarly broad patent was awarded to a U.S. firm, Systemix, of Palo Alto, California, by the U.S. Patent Office, covering all human bone-marrow stem cells.  This patent on a human body part was awarded despite the fact that Systemix had done nothing whatsoever to alter or engineer the cells.  Some, even in the medical establishment, were stunned by the Patent Office's decision.  Dr. Peter Quesenberry, the medical affairs vice chairman of the Leukemia Society of America, quipped, "Where do you draw the line?  Can you patent a hand?"

 

            It's likely that within less than ten years, the nearly 100,000 or so genes that constitute the genetic legacy of our species will be patented, making them the exclusive property of global pharmaceutical, chemical, agribusiness and biotech companies.

 

            Feminists, farmers, animal rights groups, consumer organizations, health advocates and social justice organizations around the world are coalescing into a new and powerful countervailing force to the growing genetic commerce that trades in the blueprints of life.  In May 1995 a coalition of more than 200 religious leaders, including the titular heads of virtually every major Protestant denomination, more than a hundred Catholic bishops and Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu leaders, announced their opposition to the granting of patents on animal and human genes, organs, tissues and organisms...The coalition, the largest assemblage of U.S. religious leaders to come together on an issue of mutual interest in the twentieth century, said that the patenting of life marked the most serious challenge to the notion of God's creation in history. How can life be defined as an invention to be profited from by scientists and corporations when it is freely given as a gift of God, ask the theologians?  Either life is God's creation or a human invention, but it can't be both.  Speaking for the coalition, Jaydee Hanson, an executive with the United Methodist Church, said, "We believe that humans and animals are creations of God, not humans, and as such should not be patented as inventions."  While not all the religious leaders oppose "process" patents for the techniques used to create transgenic life forms, they are unanimous in their opposition to the patenting of the life forms and the parts themselves.  They are keenly aware of the profound consequences of shifting authorship from God to scientists and transnational companies and are determined to hold the line against any attempt by "man" to stake his own claim as the prime mover and sovereign architect of life on earth.

 

            What might it mean for subsequent generations to grow up in a world where they come to think of all life as mere invention - where the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and between intrinsic and utility value, have all but disappeared, reducing life itself to an objectified status, devoid of any unique or essential quality that might differentiate it from the strictly mechanical?


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