Slashdot Mirror
India Hits Back in 'Bio-Piracy' Battle
papvf writes "The BBC News Online has an interesting story about a project to put traditional medical knowledge online. From the article: 'The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopedia of the country's traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.'"
Finally, this will hopefully put an end to the disgusting practice of patenting things know for eons. Taxmati my a$$...
First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine. Ancient people in Europe knew that chewing willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. In fact, the salicylic acid from willow bark was orginally used to synthesize aspirin. But, there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet. This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.
Even if I were convinced by that line of argument, just because India said they found some discovery first doesn't mean they actually did. Frankly, I find it more than just a little unbelievable that, as stated in the article, 80% of the US patents issued over medical plants up until 2000 were plants of Indian origin. India is not the only country around with ancient folk medicine.
What we do know is that India copies our pharmaceuticals just like they copy everything else. They pay no royalties to the companies that did the original research. They then sell these generic pharmaceuticals to other third world countries at prices far under the cost of the research, which our companies still need to recoup through sales.
In other words, India wants to justify the theft of our intellectual property by saying, "nyah, nyah, we found the plant first", whether they actually did or not. The logic is flawed anyway considering that finding the plant may or may not have ultimately been used in the final drug. We certainly don't go peeling the bark off of trees to make aspirin any more.