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Biotech Company To Patent Pigs
Anonymous Swine writes "Monsanto, a US based multinational biotech company, is causing a stir by its plan to patent pig-breeding techniques including the claim on animals born by the techniques. 'Agricultural experts are scrambling to assess how these patents might affect the market, while consumer activists warn that if the company is granted pig-related patents, on top of its tight rein on key feed and food crops, its control over agriculture could be unprecedented. "We're afraid that Monsanto and other big companies are getting control of the world's genetic resources," said Christoph Then, a patent expert with Greenpeace in Germany. The patent applications, filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization, are broad in scope, and are expected to take several years and numerous rewrites before approval.'"
It better taste good
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
"Do only evil."
So far they're on track.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
I think i'm going to invent a pair of scissors and extend the patent to cover anything you cut with them.
I was going to suggest some prior art, but I realized that cowboy neal has never been laid.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Did anyone else notice the 2005 date on the press release?
As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted from WO2004/003697 which seems to be the most likely application in question.
"We're afraid that Monsanto and other big companies are getting control of the world's genetic resources," said Christoph Then, a patent expert with Greenpeace in Germany.
Isn't Greenpeace against GMO? Why do they care then? It's not like Monsanto suddenly owns all pigs ever born.....they can still keep using normal, everyday, unmodified pigs like they do now. In fact, they should be HAPPY, because Monsanto's patent protection will prevent other people from researching and developing GMO pigs based on these techniques. It gives me the feeling that Greenpeace just wants to protest anything. Kind of reminds me of the tea-party protesters, who mostly seemed like they were out there to have fun in the name of a protest.
Qxe4
Someone has to stop these stupid genetic patents. Patents and copyrights are both way out of hand these days. Software patents, now this. I've heard of companies attempting to patent viruses and such (the kind they use to get DNA into other organisms), but a pig? I think patent law has a clause saying you can't patent a living organism (when did genes become "inventions"?). Recently though, big pharma and biotech companies like Monsanto has been lobbying to let this shit happen.
There was a movie that touched on this The Corporation. It's a Canadian movie and I think Monsanto is mentioned in there more than once.
I sincerely don't know how these companies get away with it. Giving them the same rights as people legally was a bad idea. Don't the people working at Monsanto realize how twisted this shit is?
FTFS: "its control over agriculture could be unprecedented"
It already is. It holds 70-100% of the genetically modified seed market, and is the largest producer of non-GMO seed, not to mention a major player in Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and of course pesticides and herbicides.
That's not including the lawsuits against farmers who's plants are fertilized by Monsanto crop due to airborne pollen.
In short, the vast majority of industrial farmers in the Corn Belt rely heavily on Monsanto, and those that don't are sued by Monsanto.
I am officially gone from
God help you if one of their seeds blows onto your property and one of their pigs eat it.
"Best" is relative here. Having a single company control agricultural output in the way that Monsanto does, free markets or no, is a damned dangerous thing. This is about the core structural support of civilization. Fuck with the food supply, and bad things can happen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The practices Monsanto wants to patent basically involve identifying genes that result in desirable traits in swine, breeding animals to achieve those traits and using a specialized device to inseminate sows deeply in a way that uses less sperm than is typically required.
Umm I think nature invented that device a long time ago....
Needs to be stopped, burned and sealed away.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
from http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/for_the_record/pig_patent.asp
In 2007, Monsanto sold Monsanto Choice Genetics to Newsham Genetics LC of West Des Moines, Iowa. The transaction was completed in November 2007, and Monsanto is no longer in the swine breeding business.
Since a Greenpeace publicity announcement in 2005, rumors have continued to circulate among activists and on the internet that Monsanto is trying to patent pig genes. When Monsanto owned the business, the company performed research work for a patent application related to a specific gene marker for a pig trait, but not for the trait itself, and also a patent application for a unique set of breeding processes, including an artificial insemination method. Monsanto never filed a patent application for a pig gene.
Thereâ(TM)s been some rather wild speculation that these patent applications would prohibit pig farmers from breeding lines of pigs to which they had always freely bred. This isnâ(TM)t true. Any claims issued from these patent applications would apply to only animals and their offspring which had been bred using marker technology covered by patent claims.
In any case, the sale to Newsham Genetics included any and all swine-related patents, patent applications, and all other intellectual property. Weâ(TM)re out of the pig business.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
Monsanto patented some corn strains. The patent covered any corn found to have their patented genome. They planted it, it grew and pollinated. The pollen drifted into nearby fields and pollinated the crops there. Monsanto got some of the resulting corn, tested it, found their genome, and sued the farmers for theft of intellectual property. I don't know if they finally won or not, but at the time they prevented the farmers from farming until it was resolved causing loss of income, as well as proving themselves to be willing to use the high cost of defending one's self in order to keep from losing. And that was in the US, just prior to them releasing the same strains in third world countries. The strain they distributed had the trait of not producing viable seed. They wanted all the farmers to have to buy seed every year rather than grow their own, and they feared cross pollination would produce a viable strain overriding the nonviability genes.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Monsanto is an evil, evil company. One needs only to scratch the surface of a google search on the company to come to this conclusion.
The way they have perverted the natural process of pollination - a process by which nobody has any real control - and turned it into a way to force farmers out of business and create a monopoly market is nothing short of evil.
The way they force third world countries to continue buying their products by selling them plants which create infertile seeds, rather than allowing these nations to provide for themselves and actually have a chance of pulling themselves out of third-world status, is nothing short of evil.
This has nothing to do with anti-corporate people. It has everything to do with anti-Monsanto people. Forget Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, AT&T or BT. These companies are bad in their own ways, but they are pure, virgin saints in comparison to Monsanto.
Monsanto represents everything which is wrong with extreme capitalism. It is the poster child for why government regulations are necessary, even in a free market. Sadly, Monsanto has, shall we say, 'undue influence', over many of the government officials which are supposed to be keeping them in check.
Patenting genes, DNA, and our food supply is wrong. These are the fundamental building blocks of life. If it isn't obvious why giving monopoly power over these to any company - much less one with no morality whatsoever - is bad, then you are an uneducated, dimwitted moron, plain and simple. No ifs or buts about it.
If you feel like educating yourself, go read Animal Farm. Even The 6th Day with Arnie might prove helpful to you.
Except none of these arguments matter because patents run out in 20 years.
And they only have "control" when you give it to them in exchange for a benefit. If it's not a good deal, don't buy it.
I don't mindlessly buy into your groupthink. "If you disagree, then you're stupid" tends to be an argument typical of those who promote ideas that are false.
GMO is a scam, IMO (disclaimer in advance. I am a farmer, I admit bias against monsanto and their ilk, I effin hate the bastids for years now, so take what I write with a grain of salt). It leads to proprietary vendor lock in in spades, along with a host of other issues, health issues, environmental issues and economics, it isn't all rosy. And the issue with superweeds now is getting serious. In my own state, pig amaranth is taking over a lot of fields that were grown with GM cotton then sprayed. Except it doesn't work now, the amaranth is winning. It gets ten feet tall. Some guys just *give up*. Roundup ready crops are just crops designed to be able to withstand roundup or generic equivalent herbicide so they can spray MORE on the crop and more often and not damage the crop. It works-for awhile, that's the real bottom line "for awhile", and you get lots more herbicide residue on whatever you grow. and the stuff itself ain't cheap, over a hundred bucks a jug now and goes up all the time, even the generics keep going up.
You never *really* get rid of all the weeds, you just fast track selective breed resistant weeds (or insect pests if it is insecticide, like with their BT modded corn). Even the crops themselves turn into weeds, they are having a hard time controlling their GM supercanola, it will spread to other fields and being resistant to herbicides...I think you get the picture.
Our farmers are by and large stuck in the 70s by mindset, swallowed all that rah rah rah corporate PR bullshit, now are stuck because they don't know any better and can't avoid it and will NOT admit they got suckered bad.
You think microsoft has vendor lockin...computer OS or some "office suite" is WAY down the list of humanly important *things*. Be concerned, be very concerned over food and availability going into the future is all I can say. They already have had several screwups, one of them one of these days is going to be the czar bomba screwup and will lead to mass famine sometime. I don't know what it will be, but I can about guarantee it will happen. That's my prediction.
We have climate indicators, and we have health of the crop and insect indicators, and the status of our honeybees now is a good indicator or canary in the coal mine if you will. Superweeds, honeybees croaking off, vendor lockin, loss of biodiversity..you have to look at the whole picture.
And it isn't so much that the tech is just evil, I don't believe that, it's that the tech is near completely uncontrolled despite so called regulations and studies and they have no idea whatsoever what the long term consequences will be and there's more than a little hanky panky going on with the studies. Think about all the past big corporate screwups, the really bad stuff, and they all have two things in common: 1) the corporations themselves always maintained until the last second there wasn't any problem and if there was they were just innocent bystanders, and 2) they always manage to trot out their posse of tame private scientists and academic scientists to "back them up" until it was so obvious they had to 'fess ip, pay up and admit wrong doing. That's just normal corporate policy taken as a general rule of thumb (same with governments, never admit they were wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence). Just the nature of the beast. Your default should be, be a skeptic to corporate and governmental PR and spin.
Extrapolate at your leisure, but I am not convinced at all they are the best way forward at this point. They are very profitable for monsanto and a few others, at this time, but that's it. It's bankrupting smaller farmers all over the world and leading to a global hegemony on seeds and food. Do we *really* want that to happen, do we really want to lose natural biodiversity and to keep putting millions of the poorest even further into the poorhouse? And, more importantly than that, something that impacts everyone, think of this: we have no "food insurance" or backup planet either once they