Bioprospecting

Bioprospecting is, at its core, simply the discovery and commercialisation of new products derived from biological resources - a broad and, on its own, entirely legitimate activity that has produced many genuinely useful medicines and industrial products. The serious ethical problem arises when bioprospecting shades into biopiracy: using indigenous communities' traditional knowledge of nature, developed and passed down over generations without any formal patent or documentation, for outside commercial profit, without authorisation or compensation to the people who actually developed and held that knowledge in the first place. Biopiracy specifically involves manipulating intellectual-property law - typically patent law - to claim exclusive commercial control over what is, in reality, a national or community genetic/biological resource, again without giving adequate recognition or payment to the resource's original possessors. Three real, documented cases illustrate exactly how this has played out with Indian traditional knowledge. Neem: in the early 1990s, the US Department of Agriculture and the American multinational W.R. Grace sought a European patent on a method for using extracted, hydrophobic neem oil to control plant diseases - a use Indians had already known and openly shared with the world for generations; the patent attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, and India's traditional knowledge of neem's properties was protected. Turmeric: in 1995, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent on using turmeric as a wound-healing antiseptic agent - a traditional Indian home remedy that a 1953 Indian Medical Association journal article had already documented in writing decades earlier; that prior published evidence was exactly what let India successfully challenge and overturn the patent, since it proved the 'invention' was not new at all. Basmati: in 1997, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted the Texas company RiceTec a sweeping patent on 'basmati rice lines and grains', covering exclusive use of the name 'basmati' itself, proprietary rights over seeds and grains from any crosses, and even RiceTec's breeding and grain-testing methods; India threatened to escalate the dispu …