12 votes

British farmers need all the help science can offer. Time to allow gene editing

6 comments

  1. [6]
    vord
    Link
    I don't have a substantial problem with gene editing or really anything in that vein, outside of the fact that the resulting plant/animal is property of the company that created it. It is illegal...

    I don't have a substantial problem with gene editing or really anything in that vein, outside of the fact that the resulting plant/animal is property of the company that created it.

    It is illegal to harvest seeds from GMO crops, to use yourself or resell. Small farmers can be sued if their crops get pollinated from neighboring GMO crops, even if they never wanted that.

    It is illegal to give away or sell Glo-fish (fish enhanced with bio-luminecent genes) that reproduce. If they reproduce and you can't care for the additional ones, your only legal option is to kill them.

    I personally think the patent/copywrite systems as originally designed are long dead, mostly now just weapons for large corps to bully competitors. But as they persist, they should only cover the techniques used to create the modified life, not the modified life itself.

    To circle back to the article itself...it doesn't seem in good faith unless there are protections to insure these improvements don't facilitate monopolization of the entire food supply.

    13 votes
    1. vaddi
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      I think that the next big fight between consumers and corporations is going to be related to Open Source genetic modifications. Lets see if we can win that one (but I'm pretty sure we wont), since...

      I think that the next big fight between consumers and corporations is going to be related to Open Source genetic modifications. Lets see if we can win that one (but I'm pretty sure we wont), since the other two are completely lost.

      We can already find people that are trying to prevent this, for example:
      opensourceseeds.org


      Software

      In this one corporations already found a way to circumvent the efforts of FOSS defenders. They tried to use brute force until very recently, but that started to fail. So now they seem to be FOSS friendly, because they no longer care about the code itself since we are going to be running FOSS code in their closed servers (i.e., Cloud). In fact, people developing code for free in their platforms (e.g. Github), regardless of the chosen licenses, will always benefit corporations in the end.

      Privacy

      When we realized that this was a fight, it was already lost... We, as a society, gave our privacy deliberately for free. And now after +- 15 years, some people want to regain it but it is hopeless.

      Genetic intellectual property

      I think that this one is going to end up being like the fight for privacy. When the mainstream realizes, it will be too late. Some people fight because they think that GMOs are not safe to our health, but in my opinion that is not the main issue here. Having monopolies on seeds for example is much more concerning.

      An that is just the beginning, eventually we will start editing ourselves.

      10 votes
    2. [3]
      onyxleopard
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      In the US, the notion of patents was originally supposed to be a limited (in terms of time), government granted monopoly to incentivize innovation. If you limit patents to the genetic modification...

      In the US, the notion of patents was originally supposed to be a limited (in terms of time), government granted monopoly to incentivize innovation.

      If you limit patents to the genetic modification techniques only—that is, only the GM sans the O, and you can make copies of the O, either by cloning or other forms of reproduction—the question becomes: How do you preserve the incentives for genetic engineering research in the first place? Who will pay for the development of genetic engineering science and technology? If the answer is that R&D is restricted to large corporations like Bayers, DuPonts, BASFs, Roches, Shires, Amgens, etc. with well-funded R&D departments, I think this is still fundamentally problematic.

      If the answer is, there is enough real-world economic incentive to do the research via public funding or research universities anyway, then maybe it’s OK to throw out the current system of incentives (i.e., the US patent system). But, if it’s too expensive to invest in genetic engineering because there is no guarantee of such effort being rewarded, if you throw away the current system, you risk chilling the entire field, or limiting it to large corporations.

      There are other perverse incentives of note here (which afflict software, too). Basically, if there is a biotechnology patent of interest, corporations will just wait for the patent to expire, and then begin production when the technology is not encumbered by legal risk.

      I know a molecular biologist who held a patent on a technique for genetically engineered yeast and it covered a GMO yeast strain. He was able to grant research licenses to a few universities, and he did have a small number of commercial licenses over the life of the patent (remember, patents have a limited duration). But overall, as an individual, he probably spent more resources on enforcing his rights as a patent holder in terms of his own time and patent firms’ time, than he did reaping meager financial rewards from licensing the technology. Since the patent and an extension on the patent expired, he knows of at least two startups that are using the technology, now that there is no monopoly on it. He also was talked down by patent lawyers from bringing suit against a corporation that he knew was violating his patent, but he would be unlikely to win in court. He says if he knew what he knows now, he thinks the R&D effort spent back in the 80s was wasted. According to him, the promise of being rewarded a government sanctioned monopoly was insufficient. And, as an individual, his efforts put into developing the technology and the effort to license and enforce his legal rights as a patent holder resulted in a small profit if he’s being charitable, and likely a deficit if his total time spent were tracked accurately (which it wasn’t, because this was basically his side-job for twenty years). If he were to do it again, he says the only way it would have been worth it would be if he could have managed to get the USPTO to have granted him a patent covering all yeast strains with his technique, and the USPTO doesn’t grant such broad patents.

      So, what would an incentive system look like that would actually encourage innovation and reward innovators? How would such a system overcome perverse incentives that benefit legal entities such as corporations? How would such a system ensure that the fundamental technologies necessary to ensure the global food supply is not in danger of diseases or other risk factors causing major disasters? How would such a system take into account the medical domain where the markets for drugs and gene therapies may not present clear incentives to develop solutions?

      I don’t have good answers to these questions, but I think we need scientists involved in government policy decisions to ensure that we don’t end up in a truly unlivable situation.

      6 votes
      1. [2]
        vord
        Link Parent
        A little known fact is that large swaths of new drugs are invented at public research universities, then sold off to drug companies to do the trials and FDA certifications. There is little reason...

        A little known fact is that large swaths of new drugs are invented at public research universities, then sold off to drug companies to do the trials and FDA certifications. There is little reason for them not to do the whole process, other than a lack of funding.

        If GMO is so good for society that it should be done, then maybe we should step back and wonder why we gate advancements like that behind profitablility.

        Most of our crops became that way from hundreds or thousands of years cultivating and selecting for certain properties. Somehow society survived without a company gatekeeping access to those seeds and suing people for accidentally obtaining them.

        5 votes
        1. onyxleopard
          Link Parent
          And what if our world is changing more rapidly than on the order of millennia due to human activity? We may not have a thousand much less a hundred years of buffer to react to a food supply...

          Most of our crops became that way from hundreds or thousands of years cultivating and selecting for certain properties.

          And what if our world is changing more rapidly than on the order of millennia due to human activity? We may not have a thousand much less a hundred years of buffer to react to a food supply crisis. Are we really going to sit on our hands until we are in a position where we have to beg corporations to try to save crops? Isn’t that setting up the corporations to have way too much influence on the food supply?

          1 vote
    3. DrStone
      Link Parent
      It's been a while since I looked into it, but if I recall correctly for the US, many of the legal restrictions around seed the seeds are already legal issues for patented "traditional" hybrid...

      It's been a while since I looked into it, but if I recall correctly for the US, many of the legal restrictions around seed the seeds are already legal issues for patented "traditional" hybrid seeds and most of the cases where farmers got sued for "accidental" cross pollination or drift were not actually accidental (i.e. the farmer tried to get them)

      2 votes