Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
focusing on risks, costs, and benefits, while the other perspectives have
been marginalized. During the 1990s, consumer activists and environ-
mental groups injected the other ethical perspectives into the debate.
The issue of patenting living organisms has been hotly debated since
the 1980s. The controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling,
12
which upheld
the companies' claim to patent life forms, supplied additional visibility.
The arguments against patenting life forms have been summarized by
Krimsky as follows:
13
It does not “. ...promote the progress of science
and useful arts,”
14
and often even interferes with the development of
new technologies
15
; the knowledge of crop and food production, which
underlies the development of GMOs, has accumulated over thousands
of years of human development and is taken for free to enrich the GMO
manufacturers, and thus it is '. . . . little more than blatant piracy from cul-
tures whose history has long demonstrated the “utility” of such plants.”
16
The clash of values between those who consider life as another form of
property (“genes are basically chemicals”) and those who consider the
knowledge about the functioning of a genome as something that fun-
damentally should be shared by everyone
17
is unresolved; plants and
genes represent cultural artifacts that cannot be claimed as inventions or
discoveries;
18
life forms are simply part of nature, and no ownership can
be claimed over them.
19
The impacts of patenting on the livelihood of
small farmers, who lose their free access to an essential public good, crop
seed, also enters the debate. Monsanto has taken farmers to court many
times for planting seeds obtained from genetically engineered plants.
20
12
Diamond vs. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980).
13
S. Krimsky & P. Shorett,
Rights and Liberties in the Biotech Age: Why We Need a
Genetic Bill of Rights
(Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2005).
14
US Constitution, article 1, section 8, as cited by Albright, M.,
Life Patents and Demo-
cratic Values
, in Krimsky et al., supra. At 30.
15
J. King & D. Stabinsky,
Life Patents Undermine the Exchange of Technology and Sci-
entific Ideas
, in Krimsky et al., supra, at 53.
16
Albright, supra, at 33-34.
17
Id. at 35.
18
Id.
19
Id. at 36.
20
King et. al., supra, 53.
