Instead of patenting genetic discoveries and making them artificially scarce, we should draw on traditional farming practices
The great historian Lewis Mumford once described a patent as "a
device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being
the last link in the complicated social process that produced the
invention". He was pointing out that we do not produce inventions ex nihilo, but rather draw on the totality of the inventions and knowledge that came before us.
It
is no longer just the fruits of a centuries-long social process that
are targets of patent claims. Through genetic engineering, corporations
can now create and patent new life forms. Physicist Vandana Shiva, in a
video launching the global Seed Freedom Campaign,
calls this ownership of entire new species a form of slavery, and calls
upon farmers and consumers to fight the privatisation of the genetic
commons.
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