Hope Not Hype - Third World Network

6 Hope Not Hype
The selection of land races over millennia by ancient cultures was biotechnology. The
maintenance of land races by modern peoples is also biotechnology (Tsegaye, 1997). Unfortunately,
not all kinds of biotechnology are equally amenable to receiving the financial
and other rewards appropriated by biotechnologies that can be protected by prevailing
intellectual property frameworks, causing many profoundly beneficial biotechnologies to
be underutilized because they are not distributed through a commercial provider or are not
championed by the public sector (Gepts, 2004).
The definition of modern biotechnology was based on that used by the Cartagena
Protocol on Biosafety. It is the class of human manipulations that result in unlikely or
naturally unprecedented combinations of genetic material, such as DNA or RNA, or any
activity that releases genetic material from its normal physiological constraints inside a
cell or virus and then returns it to an organism (Figure 1.1). The most obvious product of
modern biotechnology is a GM organism (GMO). GM plants are presently the main living
commercial product of modern biotechnology for agricultural use.
Products of modern biotechnology are different from other biotechnologies in at
least two important ways. First, their unique constitution of material means that they fall
outside any human experience that might inform us about their human health or environmental
impacts. Second, they are regulated by international biosafety laws and regulations
and can be protected by a set of patents and patent-like PVP instruments that until very
recently could not be applied to genes and living organisms anywhere in the world, and
still are restricted to only those countries that have agreed to adopt this kind of intellectual
property framework. While both of these differences make treatment of modern biotechnology
unlike the treatment of biotechnology in general, it is the latter that has profound
effects on who delivers technological solutions.
Figure 1.1: “The digital switch” (white square) between techniques of modern
biotechnology that constitute the manufacture of a GMO (or “transgenic”, left) and
conventional biotechnologies that do not (right).