Leading chemical and pharmaceutical corporations all sing a familiar refrain. Profits made possible by patenting new discoveries fund the research on which the future health and security of the world’s people depends. Thus Monsanto, which owns patents on genetically engineered cotton varieties, has attempted to prevent farmers from saving the seed of crops grown from their varieties and planting them the next season.

More recently, multinational drug companies facing a public relations disaster dropped their court action against a South African law that controlled the prices of AIDS medications. Nonetheless, this case serves to remind us that the privileges biomedical corporations gain through patent law, especially as that law is extended to life itself, hardly serve the public interest. They foster an ever tighter corporate stranglehold on essential foods and medicines. Acceding to corporate blackmail is neither the only nor the best way to foster research or increase access to its fruits.

Patents are, of course, sanctioned by the Constitution, but the language is extraordinarily vague. The Constitution simply states that patents may be granted “to promote the useful arts.” Throughout much of this century, the reigning standard was that patents were granted only to products or processes that were novel, non-obvious, and socially useful. Patents have been limited to inventions of machines, novel processes, and synthetic materials. “Products of nature” have been excluded from patent protection. Thus elements and minerals cannot be patented because they are found or discovered, and not invented.

In the last two decades, under pressure from the pharmaceutical, biotech and agrotech interests, the Patent Office began issuing patents on genes, human cell lines and plant strains. But as Jonathan King, professor of molecular biology at MIT, and Doreen Stabinsky, scientific adviser to Greenpeace and a faculty adjunct at College of the Atlantic, argue, “When a sunflower is genetically engineered, only a minute amount of foreign material is added to it. The sunflower is still a sunflower – the corporation adding the new material did not ‘invent’ the sunflower. Patent protection gives to that ‘inventor’ rights over all sunflowers modified in the same way, and all their progeny for the next 20 years.”

Corporations argue that such protection is necessary to stimulate research. Yet such arguments are oblivious to the history of the biotech revolution. King and Stabinsky correctly point out: “The biotechnology revolution was the product of a broad-based biomedical research and training campaign launched by the Congress after World War II, and based in colleges, universities and medical schools throughout the nation. Essential to this public endeavor was the free communication and exchange of materials and ideas. Major scientific advances, such as the determination of the amino acid sequences that made up protein chains, were openly communicated and entered the public domain. The enormous inventiveness of this period occurred without patents.”

Extraordinary inventiveness is often impeded when patents can in effect extend to the basic building blocks of nature. Researchers working for private corporations hoping to patent discoveries cannot disclose their work to others without risk to their claims of originality for the work. The rush to patent genes in recent years has, in fact, dampened the public exchange of information on which much scientific progress is based. Patenting nature’s building blocks does more to guarantee corporate profits than to promote the public good.

When Monsanto insists that farmers pay for seeds saved from previous crops, it does little more than exacerbate corporate consolidation of our food supply. Monsanto and Dupont alone already control about half of the U.S. soy and corn seed markets. Similarly, the long-term patents enjoyed by drug manufacturers are a major reason they have enjoyed profits far in excess of U.S. manufacturing norms.

Just as the original biotech revolution wasn’t funded or directed primarily by private corporations, much earlier successful development of drugs was not either. Polio vaccine and penicillin research were supported by government and foundation grants. Financing the development of new drugs through such means provides a better return on our social investments. When research is funded by the monopoly profits patents afford, the public inevitably pays not only for the profit premium but for massive and often misleading advertising and political lobbying as well. Economist Dean Baker has estimated that “consumers pay more than three and a half dollars to the drug industry for every dollar of research induced by patent protection.”

Baker also reminds us of “a long history of publicly minded research scientists who worked out of a desire to save lives, not to enrich themselves.” Even if great wealth eluded them, public policy established ways to assure that capable scientists were well supported. Many of the best and the brightest worked hard to provide the breakthroughs on which public health depended. We forget this legacy at our peril.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.