Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Life?
JimCricket writes "What happens when a bio-cracker unleashes a plant virus on all the wheat in North America, and the genetic code to 'Wheat 2.0' is closed-source, patented code owned by a corporation? Should life be Open Source? Download Aborted takes a look at this issue."
Sounds strange, outlandish, fantasy... not really.
In the real world, the article mentions the Monsanto Case against Percy Schmeiser. Their seed ended up on his land through no fault of his, yet they claim they have a right to be paid license fees or to force him to spend his time and money removing corn derived from their migrating seed.
It's not just scary that the courts will side with them on this and let them steamroll over innocent parties, but that they cannot control the spread of their lab-grown genes. One of the "fictional" premises of White Death is that even without an evil plot, a GMO could escape its farm environment and reproduce in the wild, gradually replacing the formerly dominant species on a genetic level. The problem is that this GMO has defects and liabilities that are unknown, and while it might last long enough to marginalize the genes of the wild organism it's replacing, something could come along and wipe out the newly dominant GMO en masse, leaving stocks of that animal or plant decimated worldwide.
Frightening.
Start a happiness pandemic
that's canola not corn in the monsanto case
Percy Schmeiser vs. Monsanto
By Percy Schmeiser
I've been farming since 1947 when I took over from my father. My wife and I are known on the Prairies as seed developers in canola and as seed savers. Hundreds of thousands of farmers save their seed from year to year.
I was also a member of the provincial legislature. I was on many agricultural committees, both on the provincial level and representing the province on the federal level. I was mayor of my community and a councillor for over 25 years. So, all my life I've worked for the betterment of farmers and rules, laws and regulations that would benefit them and make their farming operations viable.
The whole issue of GMOs can be divided into three main categories: the first category is the issue of the property rights of farmers versus the intellectual property rights of multinationals like Monsanto. The second issue is the health and danger to our food with the introduction of GMOs. The third issue is the environment.
Over this last year there have been other very important issues. The GM wheat issue, and what I think is one of the worst things: the pharmaceutical issue of GM plants producing prescription-type drugs, which I'll touch on later. I want to concentrate on the issue I'm involved with: Property rights of farmers vs. the intellectual property rights of multinationals.
In August 1998 I received a lawsuit document from Monsanto. Up to that time I never had anything to do with Monsanto's GM canola. I'd never bought their seed or gone to a Monsanto meeting. I didn't even know a Monsanto rep.
There were a number of items in the lawsuit. First of all, they said I had somehow acquired Monsanto's GM canola seed without a licence, planted it, grew it and therefore infringed on their patent. They went on to say that it was 80 or 90 percent contamination that I had in a roadside ditch and so on.
When we were sued my wife and I immediately realized that 50 years of research and development on our pure canola seed that was suitable and adaptable to certain conditions on the Prairies, climatic and soil conditions and especially diseases that we had in canola, could now be contaminated. We said to Monsanto at the time, "Look, if you have any of your GMOs in our pure canola seed you are liable for the destruction of our property and our pure seed." So, we stood up to them.
I think at that time there were two main issues. We lost 50 years of research and development and we felt that if farmers ever lose the right to use their own seed the future development of new seeds and plants suitable to their local climatic and soil conditions would be stopped. Those are the two main reasons we stood up to Monsanto.
It took two years of pre-trial and in those two years Monsanto withdrew all allegations that I had ever obtained seed illegally. They even went so far as to admit the allegations were false.
But, they still found that the fact that they had found some of Monsanto's GM canola plants in the ditch along my field, not even in the field, meant I violated the patent. So, it became a patent infringement case. I had no choice where it would be heard. Patent laws are federal, so it was before the federal court of Canada immediately, with one judge. It went to trial in June 2000 and lasted two and a half weeks.
That ruling is what brought my case to international attention. These are some of the main points:
1. It does not matter how Monsanto's GM canola or soybeans or any GM plant gets into a farmer's field. The judge went on to specify how this could happen: cross-pollination and direct seed movement. Believe me that's a primary cause - wind, birds and bees, because we have a lot of wind on the prairies.
The judge said it doesn't matter how it gets into a farmer's field, destroying or contaminating your crop, it all becomes Monsanto's property. You no longer own your crop. That's what startled people all over the world; how an organic or conventional farmer can lose a crop and
Their seed ended up on his land through no fault of his, yet they claim they have a right to be paid license fees or to force him to spend his time and money removing corn derived from their migrating seed.
This version of events was determined to be false by the trial court, and that decision was upheld by the Supreme Court. Instead they found that he had saved seed that he knew was Monsanto-patented, (genetically modified to resist Roundup herbicide) and planted it without paying them a license fee.
No damages were assessed, however, because the court found that he did not accrue any extra profit as a result of using the genetically modified canola seed as opposed to regular canola. The reason being that he didn't take advantage of the invention because he didn't use Roundup and therefore had no way of making extra profit based on the patented bits.
(Also, for what it's worth, the case concerned canola, not corn.)
Basically, the only way you can view the Schmeiser decision as unfairly pro-Monsanto is if you believe that genetic modifications should be inherently unpatentable. (Which is not necessarily a silly position--I'm not sure I don't think that.)
Or if you are ignorant of the true facts of the case.
Canola is the fancy name they switched to after marketing figured out why rape seed wasn't selling. (Except for China where they don't know what the word means.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What makes it worse is that (I'm guessing here) these genes were probably discovered with public funding of some sort. A similar thing happened a few years ago when the Staph aureus genome was decoded using a lot of NIH (i.e. taxpayer) money to pay for the research. The company then went out and patented it, to a great deal of uproar in the community. If you were paying attention, it also happened during the SARS scare, and I remember two companies were trying to figure out who was really the first to get to it, cuz the one in Toronto was going to essentially release it free to the world, and the other was a company that was going to patent it and make the world wait for their marketability research to figure out what name they should choose for the vaccine. Hopefully this stuff will be headed off soon, but the gov't is so hopelessly in the pharmaceutical companies pockets on this and everything else, I have little hope.
The problem is that this GMO has defects and liabilities that are unknown,
One that is known, is that it is homogenous. If the topic of the article is about someone engineering a virus, bacteria or pest that would wipe out a nation's entire food crop, then at least the first two are made massively easier by having genetically identical crops.
Consider the Irish Potato famine. One blight that affected the few imported strains of potatoes on which the nation depended caused a famine. Few people in the modern Western world really understand what is meant by that word.
'Closed-Source' might be possible in a legal sense with food, but considering the companies want to grow it everywhere and sell it to everyone, it can hardly be secure through obscurity. So is it dangerous? YES!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It would have been as simple as keeping seeds from less-contaminated areas. Like, for instance, the area of his crop furthest from the GM canola. Its not that complicated.
The court found it likely that he specifically saved the seeds from a small area of his previous crops that proved extremely resistant to Roundup. >95% of his crop the next year was found to be Roundup-resistant. That's pretty unlikely to have been the result of him planting seeds from all parts of his land (previously planted with conventional canoloa) equally.
Nonetheless, he did not use Roundup and thereby take advantage of the GM seeds' properties, thus the court assessed no damages for his actions. They did rule that Monsanto can patent a genetic modification. That's the only real precedent of the case and the only real issue anyone can argue with IMO. Assuming you grant the patent, the fact that a hypothetical farmer who purposely harvested wind-blown GM seeds and took advantage of their properties without paying the patent owner would be liable for infringement seems unremarkable to me.
You have the right to defend your property, but if they run away when you show up with your gun, you can't shoot them. You also can't shoot first if they're just stealing seeds. There has to be a threat to your life to justify shooting somebody.
I'm not taking sides, but there is definitely more than one side to this story.
This is the reply. Basically, they alledge that Percy stole the crop and planted it.
Yes, but there's more to it than this. First, Schmeiser took seed from the contaminated crop and used it to plant the subsequent year's crop. It is the second year's crop that was 95-98% percent Roundup resistant. A farmer is entitled to use his own seed. It was not his fault that Monsanto's seed contaminated his field.
Second, Schmeiser didn't use Roundup on his crop. He therefore derived no benefit from the fact that his crop was Roundup resistant. This is undisputed. It is why the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the award of damages and legal fees to Monsanto in spite of its ruling that Schmeiser infringed Monsanto's patent. This is explicit in the court's ruling. You can read Supreme Court of Canada decisions here.
Schmeiser showed that the percentage of Roundup resistant crop in his first crop was gradient in exactly the way that would be expected if it was contaminated by seed from a passing truck or other farmer's field. That is, it was highest near the road and fell off with distance.
One example: trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500,000/year, kills 100,000/year. And it drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment Melarsoprol contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. Because this is Slashdot, got to have some software analogies... they can be made. In the software world of closed source, Microsoft can discontinue support for a product, and people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. Or you can be the country of Iceland, volunteering to do all the work to make an Icelandic language verion of Windows 98, and Microsoft can just refuse you. In the biotech/med world of closed source, you can be 500,000 people not wanting to inject arsenic in their veins, and Aventis can still discontinue support for for your non-arsenic drug treatment.
It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type. Other posters in here have pointed out how many patented drugs often are first found in university labs (taxpayer funded, open source methods) before disappearing into a licencing hole.