DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 151

Policy and published in the Federal Register on December 31, 1984. Called the Coordinated Framework
for the Regulation of Biotechnology, it remains the basis of regulation today. Monsanto had won; no new
law was necessary to regulate biotech.
The Reagan era brought another gift to Monsanto and the biotech industry. It settled the question of
patenting life. This story began in 1906, when the plant nursery industry had failed to muscle enough polit-
ical power to pass legislation amending the Trademark Act in order to prohibit competitors from selling
or giving away grafts or cuttings of plants. Failure to achieve its goal led to the formation of the National
Committee on Plant Patents, a lobbying group for the American Association of Nurserymen. In 1929, Paul
Stark, whose company was famous for developing Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples, became
chair of the committee.
The nursery business lobbied successfully for passage of the Plant Patent Act of 1930, which provided
a seventeen-year patent for plants that are grown through grafts and cuttings. 12 This protection was later
extended to agricultural products, chemicals, and processes under the Patent Act of 1952. Intellectual prop-
erty rights were established for plants grown from seeds in 1970, when the Plant Variety Protection Act
gave breeders exclusive patent rights for eighteen years, but gave farmers the right to save seeds and sell
them to other farmers.
In 1980 a watershed Supreme Court decision bestowed patent protection on GE plants, animals, and
bacteria. Writing for the 5 to 4 majority, Warren Burger, the Nixon appointee, argued that laboratory-cre-
ated living things were not “products of nature” under the 1952 Patent Act and were therefore patentable.
This decision has had a far-reaching effect, creating the legal basis for establishing a patent today. Before
this landmark decision, living things could not to be patented. The decision allowed microorganisms to be
patented, triggering a 1985 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling that plants can be patented under util-
ity patent law. This decision paved the way for other patent law decisions that have made seed saving and
sharing nearly obsolete.
Pressure also mounted to allow publicly financed research and technology to be shared with private
corporations. Indicative of the rush to embrace the Reagan revolution, the National Cooperative Research
Act was introduced by the conservative Senator Strom Thurmond and sixty-eight bipartisan sponsors from
both parties in 1984. It relaxed antitrust law for joint research and development ventures, such as those
undertaken by biotech firms. Companies from a range of industries, including Monsanto, lobbied for the
Technology Transfer Act of 1986. It mandated federal agencies to make technology transfer part of their
mission and dictated that staff be evaluated during their annual performance appraisal on their success in
doing so.
All of these changes heightened the debate and controversy around biotechnology. As a result, in the
early 1980s, two industry trade associations were formed to lobby and counteract opponents. The Industrial
Biotechnology Association represented the large established companies, and the Association of Biotech-
nology Companies acted on behalf of the start-ups. A decade later, as the industry matured, the two groups
joined forces to become the Washington-based lobby shop Biotechnology Industry Organization, known
as BIO today.
Meanwhile, as biotechnology gathered political steam, the forces opposing genetic engineering were co-
alescing. The Biotechnology Working Group, an informal network of disparate organizations with a vari-
ety of concerns about the technology, began meeting in the early 1980s. Members included the Foundation
on Economic Trends, Friends of the Earth, Consumers Union (CU), and a range of other organizations, in-
cluding religious and labor groups. The coalition called for new regulation to oversee the technology, and
their biggest congressional ally was a young congressman from Tennessee named Al Gore. Although an
amateur futurist, he was skeptical about the rush of private capital to the unregulated industry. 13