Tim Radford Life is what you make of it. Right now, what you make of it is money. You can isolate a length of DNA, describe it, make something inventive, propose a use, pay some money and claim it as yours at a patent office.
Congratulations. You have joined the 21st-century gold rush. You have staked out your claim and you can exploit it. What you have is microscopically small a fragment of a chromosome but it is an acorn from which a great oak forest may grow.
You are part of an industry that barely existed five years ago, but which is now worth $50-billion. In Britain there are already 450 biotechnology companies in the business of making something new from life. In Europe there are probably 800 enterprises doing the same thing. In the United States there are about 1300 such firms.
The industry is growing at 20% a year, on something that most people hadn’t realised could be claimed as a possession at all: life. So far private firms and public institutions have filed claims on more than 127000 human genes. Other groups have been ransacking the rest of creation for wealth-creating DNA, for genes that generate something that no ordinary chemical process could ever hope to fabricate.
They are looking for treatments, cures and vaccines for diseases; they are looking for new ways of making medicines. They have been fossicking in the tropical forests, quizzing shamans, turning over exotic crops in traditional kitchen gardens. They want to make old crops grow faster or keep better, or make new kinds of health food called nutraceuticals, or organic answers to industrial pollution. They have patents on biological information that may make you fat or thin, live longer or give birth more easily. They want to find the genes that prevent sponges from getting cancer, or slugs from getting skin diseases. They want to conjure up new fabrics based on the chemistry of spider’s silk or make plastics you can grow in a field of potatoes.
Companies have been filing patent claims at the rate of 100 a week. Many of them will fail: only about one patent in 14 ever gets to market. But the ones that succeed could end up in a new plutocracy: lords of life and death and DNA.
That is the apocalyptic view. Another way of looking at it is that a new generation of bright and often young risk-takers have seen an opportunity to relieve human suffering, treat once incurable illnesses and generate new possibilities, with no guarantee of success and the very limited protection of an old-fashioned industrial instrument called a patent that gives them no more than a head start, a few years in which they can have their little corner of the field to themselves.
A gene, for them, is not life. Life is an abstraction: you cannot patent it, nor anything inside a living thing. But a gene tidied up, topped and tailed, cloned and crystallised in a form you could post in a package is something else. It is the information behind a process that leads to a product that once made someone will be prepared to pay for.
And a patent is no more than a temporary protection that prevents others from making money from that discovery. When firms have filed a patent claim, they can publish, and other researchers can use what could be information of value in other ways. With a patent they can risk the 10 years and the $160-million needed to take a drug from idea to pharmacy counter.
Britain has had patents since Tudor times; Thomas Jefferson launched a US patent office; Europe has a European Patent Office with 20 member nations. The first gene-based patents were made 20 years ago, but they were few, and many were never exploited. Now, in the past two or three years, the biotech companies have been sprinting to the patent office with applications by the armful. There has been intermittent anger and anxiety, but almost no public debate. European patent chiefs met in Munich this week to revise the European Patent Convention. But it is not clear that they are encouraging any discussion of the biotechnology directive that has turned genes into intellectual property, to be kept on a shelf, licensed to the highest bidders or simply lost in the tangle of takeovers and bankruptcies inevitable in new high-risk industries.
What is clear is that European decisions are being driven by the American stampede for patents. The US patent office has different rules and a different philosophy and critics say a tendency to let applicants get away with very broad claims.
Patents are a human invention, and like humans, faulty. There are other built-in difficulties. By definition, patent officers have to make decisions about unheard-of propositions every day. They, too, see potential problems. Could two separate groups patent the same piece of genetic information for two different functions? If so, there could be no question of anyone “owning” a gene. That, says the British Patent Office, is not clear: it needs a test case. There is a gentleman’s agreement in the biotech industry that a patent does not prevent academic research, but the text of the legislation isn’t quite clear on that point either.
The practitioners do not quarrel with the patenting of genetic information, and they do not see it as claiming a monopoly on life. They see it as business as usual. But the new business people are in a game of monopoly, and this time the real estate is something intangible, and already incorporated by everybody, everywhere: genetic information.
The systematic search for this information was begun 20 years ago by scientists in search of the causes of muscular dystrophy, or Huntington’s disease, or thousands of other afflictions that have plagued families for generations, and the money for this search was raised by charities begun by those families.
The search has widened, and accelerated: it has gone from muscular dystrophy to maize and manioc and myrrh and 10000 other life forms in the forests and savannahs of the globe. If new products and effective new treatments emerge that are widely available, then that will be a benefit.
The key phrase is: widely available. Because the alarm is that once again, natural resources intended to help the hungry, the sick, the desperate have been cornered by the rich world, which will use them to get richer. Once again, this gain is likely to be at the cost of the developing world.