The Cow Genome and Intellectual Property
There is a fascinating article over on Seed discussing the potential impacts of sequencing the cow genome. The article discusses a few issues that I find particularly important to highlight. First, livestock is really important! Duh! When well managed, livestock plays a key role in ensuring that agricultural systems function sustainably. The importance of Joel Salatin’s writings on pasture rotation to many greenhorns is highlighting something that is in many ways, knowledge that has been circulating for a long time. Livestock provide traction, fertilizers and functions as a de facto bank when farmers interact with markets. At the same time, research on livestock is remarkably underfunded these days. I wonder why? Let’s speculate for a moment.
As Boustead points out, with animal breeding knowledge (progeny testing), has doubled milk output over the last 50 years (what are the comparable numbers on rBST?) Yet, progency testing is in many ways a revised, formalized, and statistically-enhanced version of fairly conventionally animal breeding techniques. The information provided by genomic sequencing supposedly promises to bring forth a “new era of genome-enabled livestock models” which given recent trends in intellectual property promises to be accompanied by a new wave of patent filings on animal genes by large biotech firms. Monsanto already has a number of animal patents in the pipeline. My guess is that Harris Lewin’s lament about the proportions of funding directed towards animal science will be addressed in the next few years (Note: Lewin is a Prof. at UIUC where I’m doing my doctoral work, but I have no connections to him), although my guess is that funding will not come directly from the Department of Ag, but from NIH. The biomedical implications of animal genome sequencing are tremendous. Already research is being conducted on pigs using them as human models for Alzheimer’s disease and Ossabaw Island Hogs are being brought to Central Indiana as part of Eli Lily’s efforts to develop the next generation of Type II Diabetes drugs.
What is interesting to me about the potential of livestock genome sequencing and the connections to IP law is that if livestock are increasingly seen as machines that can produce heart valves, livers, and perhaps other organs for use in humans what is going to change in terms of the philosophical and legal justification for allowing patents on life, but not humans? If we can engineer pigs to produce livers that are genetically-equivalent to human livers, or perhaps custom kidneys for transplant into diabetics then what is the distinction between a patent covering a liver in a human and a liver in a pig? The ability to clone human parts, using GM livestock is very much something of interest but it is going to take some very fine legal wrangling to make it happen without disrupting the legal basis of patents on other forms “life” and I predict that there will be significant opportunities to challenge the relationships between science, government and industry.
