The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

202 the world according to monsantothey file for patents, on the grounds that GMOs are unique creations. Youhave to make up your mind: either Roundup Ready soybeans are identical toconventional soybeans, or else they’re not. They can’t be both depending onMonsanto’s interests.”Before the late 1970s it would have been inconceivable to file a patent applicationfor a plant variety, even in the United States, where the 1951patent law clearly provided that patents applied exclusively to machines andindustrial processes, but in no case to living organisms, hence not to plants.The patent system was at its origin a tool of public policy intended to stimulatetechnical innovations by granting the inventor a monopoly on the manufactureand sale of a product for a period of twenty years. “The criteria forgranting patents are usually very strict,” according to Paul Gepts, a researcherin the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of California,Davis, whom I interviewed in July 2004. “They are three in number:the novelty of the product, that is, the fact that the product did not exist beforethe inventor created it; the fact that it is not obvious; and its usefulnessfor industry. Before 1980, the legislature had excluded living organisms fromthe field of patents, because it thought they could under no circumstancessatisfy the first criterion: even if humans intervened in their development,living organisms exist before human action and, moreover, they can reproduceon their own.”With the advent of genetic manipulation, the question of plant varieties“improved” by the technique of genetic selection described in ChapterSeven arose. Concerned with recovering their investments, seed companieswon legislation which granted to their varieties what was called “plant varietyprotection,” enabling them to sell user licenses to dealers or to include akind of “tax” in the price of their seeds.* But a certificate of plant variety protectionwas only a distant cousin of a patent, because it did not prohibitfarmers from keeping part of their harvest to sow their fields the next year,nor researchers such as Paul Gepts or breeders from using the variety concernedto create new ones. This was known as the breeder’s and researchexemption.Everything changed in 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued adecision with serious consequences declaring a transgenic microorganism*The system is guaranteed by the UPOV agreements (Union for the Protection of New Varieties ofPlants), signed by thirty-seven countries in 1973.