Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate.
- Walgate, Robert
- Date:
- [1990]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![160 Miracle or menace? worth US$50 million a year in the US alone. Nearly one-quarter of the genes used in US wheat come from Mexico — but Mexico profits nothing. The US National Cancer Institute has long been running a US$8 million annual natural product cancer drug screening programme, looking among other things at tropical chemicals [2]. One-quarter of the world's pharmaceutical products are derived from tropical forests, and the search is on for more. Among many such ventures, India and Germany are collaborating to tissue-culture rare Indian medicinal plants. And the UK company Biotics Ltd is helping countries investigate their tropical plants for new pharmaceuticals, by acting as a broker for the countries with Northern chemicals companies [3]. These companies, at their own cost, will investigate the activity of the plants. Biotics is drawing up contracts under which, if marketable products emerge, the companies will pay the source country a lump sum or appropriate royalties on production in exchange for world exclusive rights on the products. Biotics has been planning such deals in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, the Seychelles and Thailand. Leading Western pharmaceutical companies like Beechams, Rhône Poulenc, Glaxo, Hoechst, NOVO and Sandoz, are said to have shown interest in such arrangements. However, there is concern over whether, in the end, the Third World countries involved will benefit fairly. And the Biotics exercise is only one among several other such ventures, many with less concern for equity. What does biotechnology have to do with this? Biotechnology is: • Widening and deepening the commercial and public interest in the collection of genes to be used in genetic engineering. • Offering alternative methods of production of new tropical products (for example, the industrial tissue culture of some root that produces a useful drug, or the cloning of rattan vines to increase numbers of vines in a forest area). • Developing genetically uniform cloned super-species which will displace farmers' genetically variable crops and animals in marginal lands, reducing available genetic diversity in the Vavilov centres. But above all, it is: • Strengthening the resolve of developing countries to protect their interests in these resources. • Providing new techniques for collecting and conserving germplasm.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18035644_0171.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
