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The confrontation between industrialized countries and resource-rich emerging nations is heating up. Drug companies have been methodically testing animals and medicinal plants for decades. But now, innovations in genetic research are enabling scientists to cast a far wider net--covering entire rain forests, from the largest banyan tree to the smallest bacterium--in their search for cures. "We see a tremendous battle shaping up," says Andrew Kimbrell, director of the International Center for Technology Assessment in Washington. The fight, he says, will be fought in part over how to revise world trade laws. Some Western countries want to exempt plants and animals from being covered by international property rights. "Third world countries," says Kimbrell, "are certain to object." The Convention on Biodiversity, drafted in 1992, is the closest the world community has come to tackling the dispute. But there is no consensus. The U.S., which has the greatest number of biological research labs, refuses to ratify the convention. Congress blocked it, Kimbrell says, because "there's a certain element opposed to all international environmental efforts. They feel it limits U.S. options."
Well-intended though it may be, the convention's provisions are impossible to police. Bio-pirates are notoriously hard to catch; they don't need to smuggle tons of a medicinal plant out of a country, just a tiny sample so that a specimen's genetic code of DNA can be replicated in a lab. Brazilian scientists, for example, are studying a frog that's used to cure intestinal diseases by members of the Yawanawa Indian tribes on the banks of the Rio Gregorio. According to anthropologists, tribesmen force the ailing person to drink a potent brew. Then they grab his arms and legs and dangle him over the edge of a precipice. Finally they place the saliva of the frog on a pointed stick and jab the stick into the patient's arm, injecting the saliva into his bloodstream. The patient begins to tremble, heaves everything in his stomach over the precipice--and is cured. If a drug can be developed, future doctors can forgo the jabbing and the hanging upside down.
Some gene rustlers also view humans as fair game. Isolated tribes are sought for their unique resistance--or in some cases vulnerability--to certain diseases. According to Isidro Shia, a pharmacologist at the University of the Philippines, U.S. scientists posing as anthropologists have been gathering tissue samples from ethnic communities in the Luzon region known for their immunity to cancer and diabetes. "Reports of exploitation--even piracy--are becoming more persistent," says Dr. Juan Flavier, a senator in Manila. For some Indian tribes in the Amazon, stealing a person's blood is the same as stealing his soul or shadow. Nonetheless, gene pirates have taken blood samples of Caiapo Indians and patented their genetic characteristics, alleges the Brasilia-based Socio Environment Institute. In Beijing, a study of 10,000 elderly Chinese administered by Duke University encountered similar complaints. A former employee of the China Research Center on Aging accused his superiors of colluding with the Americans by "exporting blood samples containing the secrets of longevity and Chinese genetic codes." The charges were denied by the research institute.
Much of the world's genetic bounty is stored in biological banks, which contain up to 100,000 gene samples apiece. For decades, drug companies and agribusiness firms have been tapping these resources without paying anything to countries where the genes were found. In the future, gene hunters won't even have to trudge through jungles. As we learn more about how the body works, drug companies will be able to tailor specific treatments to each individual. The route leading from a customized drug back to the original genetic clue found, say, in a Third World rain forest, will become circuitous and virtually untraceable. That is why environmentalists are in such a hurry to protect the biological rights of developing nations.
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