Bad Samaritans by Chang Ha-Joon

Author:Chang, Ha-Joon [Chang, Ha-Joon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2010-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, ‘if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.42 He was referring to the fact that ideas develop in a cumulative manner. In the early controversy around patents, some people used this as an argument against them – when new ideas emerge from a ferment of intellectual endeavour, how can we say that the person who put the ‘finishing touches’ to an invention should take all the glory – and the profit? Thomas Jefferson opposed patents on this very basis. He argued that ideas were ‘like air’ and cannot, therefore, be owned (although he saw no problem in owning people – he himself owned many slaves).43

The problem is inherent in the patent system. Ideas are the most important inputs in producing new ideas. But if other people own the ideas you need in order to develop your own new ideas, you cannot use them without paying for them. This can make producing new ideas expensive.Worse, you run the danger of being sued for patent infringement by your competitors, who may own patents closely related to yours. Such a lawsuit would not only waste your money but also keep you from further developing the technology in dispute. In this sense, patents can become an obstacle, rather than a spur, to technological development.

Indeed, patent infringement suits have been major obstacles to technological progress in US industries like sewing machines (mid-19th century), aeroplanes (early 20th century) and semiconductors (mid-20th century). The sewing machine industry (Singer and a few other companies) came up with a brilliant solution to this particular problem – a ‘patent pool’, where all the companies involved cross-licensed all the relevant patents to one another. In the cases of the aeroplanes (the Wright brothers vs Glenn Curtiss) and the semiconductors (Texas Instrument vs Fairchild), the firms concerned could not reach a compromise, so the US government stepped in to impose patent pools.Without these government-imposed patent pools, these industries could not have progressed as they have done.

Unfortunately, the problem of interlocking patents has recently become worse.More and more minute pieces of knowledge have become patentable, down to the level of individual genes, thereby increasing the risk of patents becoming an obstacle to technological progress. The recent debate surrounding so-called golden rice illustrates this point very well.

In 2000, a group of scientists led by Ingo Potrykus (Swiss) and Peter Beyer (German) announced a new technology to genetically engineer rice with extra beta carotene (which turns into Vitamin A when digested). Because of the natural colour of beta carotene, the rice has a golden hue, which gives it its name. The rice is also considered ‘golden’ by some because it can potentially bring important nutritional benefits to millions of poor people in countries where rice is the basic staple.44 Rice is nutritionally very effective, able to sustain more people than wheat, given the same area of land.But it lacks one critical nutrient – Vitamin A. Poor people in rice-eating countries tend to eat little else other than rice and therefore suffer from Vitamin A deficiency (VAD).

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