BY JEFF CHU Davos
| JANUARY 27 |
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You didn't have to get the word "blastocyst" to understand that there was
some serious disagreement at the WEF panel Friday on intellectual
property and genetic material. Onstage to air and share were four
luminaries from different parts of the scientific spectrum: Ian Wilmut,
best known for cloning Dolly the sheep; Jeremy Rifkin, a science and
technology trend-watcher; Ajay Piramal, head of an Indian pharmaceutical
company; and Dorothy Nelkin, NYU professor of sociology and law and a
specialist in the public impact of science.
At issue: when it comes to genetic material and DNA, what can be
patented? Who holds the intellectual property rights to genes? Friday's
forum was an extension of an ongoing debate among scientists, doctors,
politicians and patients. And as Ellis Rubinstein, the Science magazine
editor and moderator of the discussion, said, "It's only going to get
more heated, in many, many ways."
To seat Wilmut next to Rifkin was to set the stage for combustion.
Wilmut, an advocate of the right to patent genetic innovations, said that
the extraordinary expense of research justified patents to permit
experimentation to continue. He said that the price tag for lab work
could rise "up into many millions more if we were to develop a product."
Patents both help to attract capital and maintain a space in which
scientists can work independently.
But such issues were beside the point for Rifkin, whose principal
assertion was that genes cannot "belong" to anyone. He discussed the
preparation of a global treaty "to make the gene pool a commons," with
access to all scientists around the world. "There's a real question here
about control over this raw resource for future generations," he said.
"These genes don't belong to Brazil and they don't belong to Dr. Wilmut."
Nelkin pointed out that extraordinarily delicate issues are involved
"when the patented object is part of the human body." She warned against
the opening of a "technology bazaar" in which body parts can be
"harvested like a crop, mined like a resource." And she acknowledged the
concerns of various indigenous people groups, who have had their genetic
material collected and analyzed by scientists. "Indigenous peoples are
concerned about what they call biocolonialism," she said. There is a
question of whether the samples taken "are useful to the people from whom
the blood and genes are taken."
Piramal, chairman of Nicholas Piramal India, also asked questions about
usefulness and argued that patents should only be granted when there is
"an invention not a discovery." Moreover, the discovery "must be novel
and useful." One of the problems with current patenting is that
scientific innovations are often granted protection even before their
utility is fully proven.
At times, things got personal. Wilmut criticized Rifkin for using "overly
emotive" language, while Rifkin slammed the "runaway utilitarianism"
reflected in the "whims and caprices" of those in research. "I am sure
you loved your little sheep," he said to Wilmut, "but I think it sends
the wrong message to our children."
Right and wrong, though, meant completely different things to the
panelists. The sheer magnitude of the issues involved, not to mention the
potential profits to a patent-holder who could exploit an innovation for
commercial gain, raised a host of questions that could not possibly be
dealt with in one session. "Right of ownership of one's own genetic
material is not clear," Nelkin said. And if one thing is clear, it's that
the debate is far from over.
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