Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
— Balwinder Shaikh’s Pir in Amrit
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p>Mama Beeb reports that India is putting together an ayurpedia to fight inappropriate patents in developed countries (via Slashdot): Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin
In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts… One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit…. putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopædia of India’s traditional medical knowledge…Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project… reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin… … in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database…
Mogambo is displeased
The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages – English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish – in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them. The electronic encyclopædia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts…
… ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language… there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old… [Link]
The government is finally casting off its fatalist attitude on biopiracy, being proactive after winning patent cancellations on turmeric, neem and basmati rice:
… the government spent some $6m alone in fighting legal battles against the patenting of turmeric and neem-based medicines. In 1995, the US Patent Office granted a patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric. Indian scientists protested and fought a two-year-long legal battle to get the patent revoked.Last year, India won a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent Office against a patent granted on an anti-fungal product, derived from neem, by successfully arguing that the medicinal neem tree is part of traditional Indian knowledge.
In 1998 the US Patent Office granted patent to a local company for new strains of rice similar to basmati, which has been grown for centuries in the Himalayan foothills of north-west India and Pakistan and has become popular internationally. After a prolonged legal battle, the patent was revoked four years ago. [Link]
The Beeb suggests one of the targets should be Bikram Yoga:
And, in the US, an expatriate Indian yoga teacher has claimed copyright on a sequence of 36 yoga asanas, or postures. [Link]
I’m a little skeptical of the 80% claim since the Amazon basin is also a huge biomine. It’s interesting that the Indian government is essentially open sourcing the knowledge rather than playing the game and extracting patent profits overseas. I assume they’d be beaten with chappals outside Rashtrapati Bhavan if they actually tried to patent common knowledge.
To some degree, biopiracy is the overhang of an Indian legal system which hasn’t taken intellectual property seriously to date, even defensively. On the flip side, it’s the American version of lazy borrowing in India, with screenwriters ripping off American movies and startups like Baazee.com doing the Indian version of eBay — only, in imitable American style, the potential profits are much greater.
Related posts: Patenting the chapati, Bird flu
I think the patent in Bikram yoga refers to the 36 asanas in a controlled heat environment rather than the asanas itself. Anyone can start their own yoga style using the same 36 asanas, but mix it with the sequence and add the element of heating the yoga room temperature to 110 degrees, only then are you infringing on the patent.
As many of you know, recently India developed a version of the expensive and multi-pilled AIDS cocktail but were able to combine all of the different medicines into a single pill and can sell it for $1.
US Pharma cried bloody murder at the thought of Indians selling this innovative life saver to desperate places like Africa when they should be getting rightfully more wealthy by selling mountains of pills to health organizations, NGOs and countries that can barely afford them even if they could get people to take 50 different pills a day. Big pharma is using patent law to protect their
profitsI.P.My first thought was that the hypocrisy of some of these patent laws might give India some leverage to provide cheap and effective medicines to its own population and other countries without interference from the pharmas and our gov’t which will bend over and take it at the snap of their fingers.
Yeah Right, like hypocrisy ever stopped these corporations from making an extra dime at the expense of someone else’s life.
I wonder how many degrees away from 110 would eliminate the infringement?
I thought there was a copyright on the term “Bikram” also, which was why you see “hot yoga” now at so many studios instead of “Bikram yoga.” Is it the temperature or the poses that are patented? From what I was told, Bikram does a lot of non-traditional postures that are really bad for your body. Maybe this was biased info since it came from a friend of mine who hates Bikram, though 🙂
that’s part of the story.
the indian patents are awarded on the process. companies like cipla and ranbaxy are very good at developing new processes for back-engineering established drugs. the multinationals cry foul because they say that the r&d effort was spent proving the drug worked in the first place and in all the clinical trials.
at last call, the one drug that the indian pharma companies had produced with an international patent was some laxative, isabgol .
About time. Cheers to the Indian govt. for this one. My mother, like most Sri Lankan moms, would feed us a gotu kola salad (with onions and tomato..became quite yum as I grew into appreciating slightly bitter foods) so imagine my surprise when I first spotted Gotu Kola herbal pills.
Also imagine my puzzlement when I’d hear ‘alternative health practitioners’ (aka hippies) talk about Gotu Kola as a stimulant. Took me ages to figure out what they meant, because we ate gotu kola (and that’s what it’s called in Sinhalese) for cardiovascular, neurological, etc. health. Finally realized that they’d confused it with Kola Nuts. idiots.
That Bikram yoga guy is an opportunistic freak. And from what I understand, the problems with his ‘hot yoga’ methods are that: 1. people become really, unhealthily, dehydrated 2. the heat allows for a deeper stretch, which isn’t bad in itself…but some people end up stretching past what their bodies are ready to do (in a normal temp room) and they hurt themselves without knowing it.
As for his pose sequence…he says his “scientifically” patented sequence is the ‘optimal order’ for a whole bunch of things that basically mean hooey. Also, amusingly (depending on your sense of shadenfreude) the FAQ section on his site lists many variations on the question “I’m in pain after Bikram yoga. Is this normal?”
Anyway, speaking of men I’d like to slap until the brown comes off…publishing rumor has it that Deepak Chopra is writing his “interpretation” of the kama sutra. Just so you know I ain’t making this up, see here.
Is it just me, or does he look creepily naked on that site?
It’s not just you. Thought exactly the same thing myself.
And the “baldy in the front, squirrel-tail in the back” hairdo isn’t helping him look any less creepy.
Maybe he jacks up the heat to subliminally promote a nudist agenda…?
The “secular” forces will not stand for this “saffronization” of Medicine. “Prior existing knowledge” is a code-word for saffronizing.
/end sarcasm
only, in imitable American style, the potential profits are much greater.
and the stakes are much more serious. Can’t find a link right now, but there’s a book by a Cal polisci Prof called the success of open source that notes the immense potential to apply the opensource model/Nonprofit to pharmaceuticals.
“Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin”
This is why I don’t feel any pain when american corporations bitch about copying of their drugs by Indian companies.