ENVIRONMENT: New patents on fish and people stir up a storm

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 1995 (IPS) - The Hagahai — a small tribe in the South Pacific — and salmon from the Atlantic Ocean will share something in common next year: the right to sell genetic material from their bodies will be owned by U.S. corporations.

The Hagahai and the salmon have unique DNA — microscopic code in their genes that determines biological traits, from skin colour to susceptibility to disease. Corporations and government agencies would like to “patent” the DNA so they can re-sell it at a profit.

These patent applications has provoked a storm of protest from groups like the Community Nutrition Insitute (CNI) here and Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) in North Carolina.

Both groups have taken their concerns to a two-week international meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, that began Monday. Activists, scientists and government officials have gathered there to draw up plans to implement the biodiversity convention.

This is the second meeting of the signatories to the convention, which was signed by heads of state at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The first meeting was held in Nassau in the Bahamas last year.

The secretariat of the convention — which is based in Geneva, Switzerland — has also held several meetings of experts to discuss the contentious issue of commercial use of unique genetic material.

Some individual species — or small, isolated human communities — share genetic resistance or susceptibility to particular diseases. Scientists around the world are attempting to isolate the most desirable genes for duplication and use on other species.

The activists argue that genetic material should not be bought and sold like any other commercial product. In addition, they warn that altering genetic material in a laboratory could have dangerous side-effects.

Scientists who have studied the Hagahai — a group of 240 people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea — say that the community shares certain unique blood cells which may have important disease-fighting properties.

Hoping to reap profits from that material, the government- funded National Institutes of Health applied for — and received — a U.S. patent on a Hagahai cell line earlier this year.

“In the days of colonialism, researchers went after indigenous peoples’ resources and studied their social organisations and customs. But now, in bio-colonial times, they are going after the people themselves,” says Pat Roy Mooney, RAFI’s executive director.

There have been two precedents for “patenting” the medical applications of human genetic material: blood samples drawn from the inhabitants of the remote South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha and cancer cells from the spleen of a Seattle businessman named John Moore.

The Tristan de Cunha blood samples, which scientists believe could be used to fight asthma, have been sold for 70 million dollars to a German company named Boehringer Ingelheim.

The doctors who treated Moore for “hairy cell leukemia” have been awarded the rights to commercialise any new medicines they develop from his cells.

Moore sued the doctors for a share of the profits, but California courts ruled against him in 1990. He won a partial victory this year when he successfully lobbied the European Parliament to outlaw the patenting of cells.

But he does not appear stand a chance here. “Under our laws… subject matter relating to human cells is patentable and there is no provision for considerations relating to the source of the cells that may be the subject of a patent application,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown recently.

Edward Hammond, an activist with RAFI, warns that the Hagahai patent is just the first step of a major effort, called the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), to patent the cells of indigenous groups around the world.

HGDP has been up and running for six years already. It has recieved 200 million dollars in government funding to research human blood and tissue samples from as many indigenous groups in the world as possible.

HGDP scientists have provided RAFI with a draft list of 700 groups which could be subjects for research. HGDP lawyers insist that the research is purely scientific in intent, while project scientists say they will carefully respect local community rights.

Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University in California who advises the HGDP, points out that the Hagahai explicitly asked to work with the scientists.

Greely also says that the Hagahai have given “informed consent,” which is to say that the community has been fully informed of their rights, as well as of the significance of the patents taken out on their cells.

“The DNA itself is not patented and its use is not restricted in any way. The donors involved can continue, obviously, to use their own DNA to run their bodies,” he says.

“They could also, if they chose, patent anything they wanted to patent that was an ‘invention’ from their DNA, EXCEPT to create their own cell-lines that are infected with the (target disease) and using those cell-lines for commercial purposes,” he adds.

But Maori groups in New Zealand say that Greely is using a western concept that has little meaning in the Pacific islands. “While Professor Greely was here in Aotearoa we spent a considerable amount of time discussing this illusive concept of ‘informed consent,”‘ says Aroha Mead.

“The more we discussed it, the more ephemeral it became. What is informed consent? A population of 500,000 or even a population of 3,000 – how does one achieve the ‘informed’ consent of populations/communities? Every single person or individual?” asks Mead.

Meanwhile, other activists point out that there is yet another worrying threat from patented genes for use outside their normal environment.

CNI activists released a report last week to say that scientists have isolated genes from the coho salmon fish which have then been injected into chinook salmon to make the chinook grow four to six times faster.

CNI says that Aqua Bounty Farms, a company near Boston, has applied for a patent for a technique their scientists have invented to inject coho hormones into other fish — like the chinook salmon — to make them grow faster. The company hopes to get approval for the patent by next year.

Planting new genes in fish could have Frankenstein-like consequences, argues Richard Schweiger of CNI. “Fast-growing transgenic (fish) could escape from a pond and outcompete native species,”he says. This could kill off native species or even spread unknown new diseases.

This worry has already been raised by activists with the Union of Concerned Scientists who have already submitted objections before government administrative bodies to the use of laboratory- altered genes, in crops from tomatoes to squash.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration have ignored these objections and issued patents to companies like Calgene for their new products without restrictions on use or consumption.

Schweiger says that the Jakarta meeting should challenge this by adopting a “biosafety” protocol that will include “mechanisms that address liability and compensation for adverse effects on biological diversity, including research, development, handling and disposal.”

ENVIRONMENT: New patents on fish and people stir up a storm

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 1995 (IPS) - The Hagahai — a small tribe in the South Pacific — and salmon from the Atlantic Ocean will share something in common next year: the right to sell genetic material from their bodies will be owned by U.S. corporations.
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