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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.'"
No, rather it makes the execution and support of free ideas what is worth paying for, rather than the ideas themselves.
Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they describe as "bio-piracy" for a long time.
I would think that the citizens of India are the least likely to be victimized by such a patent. It would seem that it won't hold in their country, so noone there can be barred from using these therapies. And the average non-Indian citizen of, say, the U.S. is unlikely to start using these therapies - and hasn't heard of them in any case. The only victim I see (other than a lot of peoples' sense of fair play) would be those of Indian descent living abroad in the U.S. or another nation whose patent system doesn't recognize these therapies as prior art.
Of course, I'm referring to what I assume the vast majority of these therapies are - esoteric. The more mainstream ones (e.g. turmeric, rice) - those could be a problem.
It's disgusting that people are even allowed to patent naturally occuring biological phenomenon. Patenting medicinal properties of plants/animals, DNA sequences, and suchlike is just plain bad. Taking credit for your own creations is fine, but not nature's.
For anyone wanting to wave the "if you don't let them patent it and rape the world for money for a simple discovery, nothing will get discovered - ever!" flag, I'd rather have a wordwide tax that funds such research.
If you're religious or not (and I'm not), I'm sure most people will get just a little uneasy at the idea of patenting aspects of life itself. A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? Screw that.
I think this is a great idea, even beyond medicine.
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Knowledge of these medical traditions can give great insight the cultures they originated from (I say this since they are obviously not the current culture, though they might be cultural anscestors)
I'd love to see more movements like this, not just medicine, but traditional stories and the like, as well.
I love technology!
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Some people'd definitely take the trouble (especially when some huge company with excess of money's gonna start charging licensing fees from you for all kinds of stupid things)2 381300.htm
Check this out
http://www.hindu.com/2005/03/09/stories/200503090
In this particular case along with saying - uhm, we knew that.... they'd shown proof of people using the technique from a long time also though.
Traditional medicine . . I'm thinking this probably includes substances/techniques that have been in use for centuries and if it's a developing country where YOUR patent wouldn't be inforcable anyway what's the harm in their being able to develop and use something that increases their quality of life?
You say that as if it were a bad thing.... People doing good for others for altruistic purposes rather than profit?! How horible! I dunno, maybe those who seek to reap the benefits of such patents might have to work for a living like everyone else if that were to happen. That would be a terrible, terrible thing.
I definitely applaud this move. Patenting something that's been a known remedy for years - if not centuries, even - in India is like me patenting chamomile tea for soothing upset stomachs. Ridiculous, but is is happening, and I can see why they'd want to prevent any more of it from happening.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I'm no Christian fundamentalist but in the book of Genesis didn't god give all living things on earth to mankind. That means everybody has equal rights, kind of like a bio GPL.
Now given G.W Bush's right wing religious views and support for the teaching of intelligent design. Allowing the creation of these bio monopolies really is like condoning piracy.
So does Bush really believe in the word of god? or just the word of big business?
In either case I'd be worried about the voices he hears in his head telling him to invade 3rd world countries.
Now will someone please pass the tinfoil hat.
this move is not about making money off licensing, it's about opening information for everyone. what if a treatment that's been known for centuries suddenly becomes closed because of patent infringement? the OSS community here wouldn't have a problem empathizing with the cause. it wouldn't be entirely offtopic to bring to your attention Dr. Vandana Shiva, a known activist against biopiracy, who has won among others two major cases - the move to patent Basmati (a strain of rice) in US and the case of patenting a Neem-derived fungicide in Munich. this is a step in the right direction.
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Traditional doesn't mean "affordable" ..in fact given the super low per capita GDP .. 60 years sounds like a very high number.
.. even wikipedia credits someone who was cured by of malaria by Brazilian traditional healers using quinine as being the "discoverer" of the malaria cure. Just about all non prescription pain killers are of plant origin as well (morphene, Aspirin etc.). It's only the specialized medicines that have been produced recently over the last 15 years that are synthesized originally.
Most over the counter medicines you buy originate in nature. For example, most cold medicines contain "pseudoephedrine HCL" which is a synthetic analog of from of what comes from the ephedra plant. Take a medicine and look up he origin of the active ingredient. Many important "cures" of the past were known to traditional doctors but uncredited (for example, quinine tree bark cures malaria
As the article has already mentioned that some of the traditional medicines are extensively used in India, this encyclopedia will enable people from the whole world to know about these medicines. Imagine searching on internet for a medicine for common cold or diabetes and finding couple of traditional remedies. People can leave their feedbacks and ratings of the remedies after they have tried them so that others can benefit too. Some of these medicines can be made at home using tea or neem leaves. They can be thus tried at home (and people need not go to an aurvedic doctor to get the medicine to some remote location in India). The good thing about natural medicines is that they do not have side effects. One can just try them and if they don't work try some other medicine. In US, it is interesting to see that even a small common cold medicine will have side effects as depression, nausea, liver failure, etc. I think as the health cost in US rises, more people will benefit from alternative of traditional medicines.
When I interviewed at medical school a couple of years ago my interviewer asked me to name an ethical question and give arguments for both sides. I told him that I had recently read an interesting book that had a chapter describing how an opthalmologist had patented a certain surgical technique and demanded royalties from another opthalmologist who had independently discovered it and had been lecturing on his use of it.
The arguement against this sort of practice is easily the moral high ground, especially in a profession such as medicine which has a tendency to idealize altruism and selflessness. (Not that we succeed all of the time, mind you.) The counter-argument is the old line about creators being entitled to profit from their inventions. This argument is probably stronger in the entertainment industry, but in medicine it's pretty weak.
Proprietary software is actually a big problem in medicine, especially when patient data has to be exchanged between hospitals. I've seen entire imaging studies redone simply because the doctor who needed to see it didn't have the right software to view them. It's absurd to have to repeat an MRI for such a stupid reason.
I've actually considered doing a dual degree program and getting an MD/JD, with a legal specialty in intellectual property law. I predict that the intersection of medicine and IP law will be the scene of an important and bitter battle in the next few decades.
So how did my interview go? I got accepted!
You just meant to be funny, not crass, I'm sure.
To address the point you make, yes, India does have a thriving medical community that practices western medicine. In fact, that is the dominant form of treatment an Indian will likely receive.
However, the posted article talks about bio-piracy. It is about patents handed out to Western companies that used the treatments from Ayurvedic system and claimed it to be their own invention. So, it is rather a case of the Western pharmas studying traditional Indian medicine.
Perhaps we'll all live shorter lives now. Going by your logic.
Hmmmmm. I wonder; isn't there a pretty heavy market in the relatively unregulated market of "supplements" and so forth? I don't think they're allowed to make specific claims about, say, curing diseases, lest they get treated as actual drugs, but that doesn't seem to stop people from buying gingseng and echinacea (sp?) and so forth.
The marketing would largely be word-of-mouth, perhaps supplemented by low-end cable and specific publications. If you're going to market random herbs or animal parts involved in Chinese folk medicine, for instance, a local vendor might consider putting an ad in a local Chinese-language newspaper and otherwise targeting the local Chinese immigrant community hoping to find customers who've kept with those customs. Perhaps one would also target the New Agers who readily turn to any and all forms of alternative medicine, although many would likely be a bit squeamish over the use of bears' gall bladders and so forth; and those other Westerners who've found Western medicine lacking for whatever reason. There's many who pay attention to more than just the latest ad blitz from Pfizer or whoever.
As a side note, I might suggest that there seems to be some audience for medical marijuana, even though it's not massively marketed or even legal (according to the Feds, anyway, and Federal jurisdiction over this hasn't been struck down AFAIK).
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