Next - by Michael Crichton and......

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So much for 'categorizing' this under 'Fiction'!! To me, it didn't sound too far away from reality, looking at all the happenings around, these days.... Crichton attempts to extrapolate the gene patents and research in the medical field into a horror story (infact, it is a horror 'happening' and not a 'story'!). The author stuck only to the gene patenting in the medical field, but to me (should, for everybody else!), it is a reality check on the entire patenting business. I really don't understand what is patenting anymore (of course, I am just a layman in the technical terms, anyway)...

Here is my understanding: You don't have to 'invent' something new to 'patent'. If you can invent 'something' that had not been patented 'already', then you can actually 'patent' it.

Take for example the attempt to patent Basmati Rice by a Texas company Rice Tec (ooooh... Rice Technology!), when Kashmiri farmers have only cultivated this for a mere thousand years or so... Vandana Shiva, an activist for biodiversity has many such examples.. I believe this book would be a good resource for that. I recently saw this documentary 'The future of Food' - mind boggling (or should be say 'numbing'?).

I do understand that I am looking all these things through the eyes of activists' who are always against corporations/ against innovations (?!?) / against market economics... so on... but, I am at loss to understand how these corporations (pharma and food companies) can both satisfy their shareholders through their quarterly numbers as well as do 'philanthropy' by providing the fruits of their research to the disadvantaged world population! After all, they are in the business of 'making' money and you can't really blame them for that... I guess, there is only other way to look at it then - through the eye of an activist or an NGO!

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 18, 2009 at 9:34 AM

    I did see "The future of Food" on Netflix. It is definitely everyone should watch but then what choice we have in this high tech world.

    In India, we ate what we was naturally grown cheap but here we pay lot more for anything naturally grown.

    Probably as a species we bought this upon ourselves. We have become a selfish lot, consuming more than what is our rightful share and so and so forth.

    Well I digressed from this topic..

    Aravind

    ReplyDelete

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