BoingBoing reader Chris Spurgeon says,
Brazil is sick and tired of companies stealing their plant names, and they're not going to take it any more! Brazil has a wonderful rep for not just rolling over and accepting the increasingly draconian intellectual property treaties being foisted on developing nations by the first world. Their latest move comes in response to a growing trend. It goes like this:1) Brazilians spend millennia eating some great tasting Brazilian plant that's also great for your health.
2) Foreign company learns about the plant.
3) Foreign company trademarks the plant name and creates a company to sell the plant (turned into a health drink, or shampoo, or anti-aging cream, or brain-tonic pills, or God knows what else).
4) Some poor guy in Brazil opens up a local business cooking up the plant for the locals. (He uses the plant name in his company's name). He starts a little export business selling his product.
5) He gets the pants sued off of him because some company 5,000 miles away trademarked the plant name. Never mind the fact that folks in Brazil have been calling the plant by that name forever.
6) Repeat over and over.Brazil has now come up with a wonderfully pragmatic way to break this cycle. They've compiled a list (there's a pdf here) of more than 5,000 Portuguese language names of plants, seeds, roots, etc. They've shipped the list off to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and trademark offices around the world. The idea is that if all of these organizations and countries know a term is already in use they will be less likely to grant some company a trademark on it. Clever!
Link to article on the Intellectual Property Watch website. Image courtesy of Mauro Peixoto at The Fantastic World of Brazilian Plants, which does indeed look quite fantastic.
Reader comment: Jason Bandlow says,
Brazil is not the only country trying to defend the knowledge its people have had for centuries. This article from the BBC last December describes India doing the same thing for medicine. Link
My co-editor David Pescovitz points to the work of Jay Keasling, pioneering researcher at UC Berkeley in synthetic biology, who wants to engineer bacteria to produce the precursor of a promising anti-AIDS drug. Pesco reminds us that Craig Venter is doing similar work to make organisms that crank out ethanol. Snip:
Despite Prostratin's promise as an anti-AIDS drug, its supply is limited by the fact that the drug has to be extracted from the bark and stemwood of the mamala tree. Researchers in the laboratory of Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical engineering, plan to clone the genes from the tree that naturally produce Prostratin and insert them into bacteria to make microbial factories for the drug.
A microbial source for Prostratin will ensure a plentiful, high-quality supply if it is approved as an anti-AIDS drug," said Keasling, who also is a faculty affiliate with the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) and head of the Synthetic Biology Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We consider the actual gene sequences as part of Samoa's sovereignty, and every effort will be made to reflect this fact."
The agreement, signed by Prime Minister Tuila'epa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi of Samoa and UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Research Beth Burnside, gives Samoa and UC Berkeley equal shares in any commercial proceeds from the genes. Samoa's 50 percent share will be allocated to the government, to villages, and to the families of healers who first taught ethnobotanist Dr. Paul Alan Cox how to use the plant. The agreement also states that UC Berkeley and Samoa will negotiate the distribution of the drug in developing nations at a minimal profit if Keasling is successful.
Link. Here's a profile Pesco wrote of Keasling last year: Link.
