ILLUSTRATIVE OPPOSITION
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‘discovered’ and thus ‘claimed’ the New World of North America, a continent
that had been home to civilizations of native people for thousands of years,
biotechnologists are ‘discovering’, recombining, and laying daim to the
cell-lines of plants, animals, and even human beings whose DNA might prove
useful to such industries as agriculture, pharmaceuticals, or reproductive
medicine.
The question of legal patents of cellular materials is one of the most
controversial issues surrounding biotechnology. Historically, a patent gave
exclusive rights to an inventor to exploit a product, process, or a particular use
of a product for a limited time, usually ranging between 17-24 years. In order
to obtain a patent, the product or process had to be invented The precedent
for patenting was established at the International Convention for the Protection
of Industrial Property held in Paris in 1883, the first international agreement on
intellectual property rights. By 1930, the Plant Patent Act permitted the granting
of patents for plants reproduced by cutting or grafting to produce plant hybrids
in the United States. Toward the end of the 1970s, as practices of genetic
engineering through recombinant DNA became increasingly successful (and
thus potentially commerdally viable), a quiet war began to emerge between
private corporations, patenting courts, and the Supreme Court regarding the
right of individuals to patent a wider variety of life forms.
Beginning in 1971, the General Electric (GE) company embarked on the
crusade to obtain the first patent for a non-plant life form. In 1970, GE engineer
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty developed a specialized bacterium that promised
to break down or ‘eat’ oil from tankers spills. Over a period of ten years, GE
and the Court of Customs and Patents Appealed (CCPA) waged a relentless
campaign of litigation against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office OPTO) and
the Supreme Court to patent this oil-eating bacteria. Once patented, GE knew,
the bacteria could set a precedent for future patenting of other life forms to be
appropriated by biotechnology corporations.^ In 1980, GE’s oil-eating bacteria
won its case as the Supreme Court granted Chakrabarty his patent. In this
gesture, the Supreme Court determined life itself patentable, stating that “the
relevant distinction was not between living and inanimate things” but whether
living products could be seen as “human made inventions.’^
As predicted, GE’s Chakrabarty case opened the floodgates for the
budding biotechnology industry. That same year, emerging biotechnology
industries such as Genetech and Cetus took Wall Street by storm, setting
records for the fastest price per share increase ever. The burgeoning
biotechnology industry inspired other corporations and scientists to patent not
only microorganisms, but plant, animal, and even human life forms as well.7
Presented as a solution to urgent problems of disease or world hunger,
biotechnological inventions also ‘solve’ capitalists’ ‘need’ for profit and growth.