The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

the iron law of the patenting of life 203patentable. The case had begun eight years earlier when Ananda MohanChakrabarty, a geneticist working for General Electric, had filed a patent applicationfor a bacterium that he had been altered to enable it to consumehydrocarbons. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had logically rejectedthe application according to the terms of the 1951 law. Chakrabarty appealedand won in the Supreme Court, which stated: “Anything under thesun that is made by man can be patented.”This startling decision had opened the way to what has been called the“patenting of life”: based on U.S. precedents, the European Patent Officein Munich granted patents on microorganisms in 1982, on plants in 1985,on animals in 1988, and on human embryos in 2000. Theoretically, thesepatents were granted only if the living organism had been altered by geneticengineering, but in reality the process has gone beyond GMOs alone.Patents have now been granted for non-transgenic plants, particularly if theyhave medicinal properties, in total violation of existing laws. “Ever sincebiotechnology came on the scene, the common-law system of patents hasbeen abused,” Christoph Then, the Greenpeace representative in Munich,told me in February 2005. “To get a patent, it is no longer necessary to presenta real invention; often all you need is a simple discovery. Someone discoversa therapeutic use for a plant, the Indian neem tree, for instance,describes it, isolates it from its natural context, and files a patent applicationfor it. The deciding factor is that the description be done in a laboratory, andno attention is paid to the fact that the plant and its virtues have beenknown by others for thousands of years.” 1The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants more than seventy thousandpatents a year, about 20 percent of which involve living organisms. Ittook a long struggle for me to get an interview with a representative of thishuge institution, which is under the authority of the Commerce Departmentand employs seven thousand agents. A citadel in the Washington suburbs,the Patent Office is a strategic location for a company like Monsanto,which secured 647 patents associated with plants between 1983 and 2005.“The Chakrabarty case opened the door to a very exciting period,” saidJohn Doll of the biotechnology department when I met him in September2004. “We now grant patents on genes and transgenic plants and animals,any product of genetic engineering.”“But a gene is not a product,” I said, a little taken aback by his triumphanttone.