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Safeguarding our rich
biodiversity
Since Independence, hardly anyone in Papua New Guinea had a real
sense of what Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) really meant
for us, both as an individual right as the world knows it and
how this right, if properly identified, administered and
safeguarded is indeed the key to translating into competitive
edge necessary for the growth of our economy.
In this inevitable era of a knowledge-based global economy in
which nation-states are fiercely competing to secure market edge
over and against each other, IPR and its development is
nonetheless a national activity that this and future governments
must take serious stock of if we were to move any notch up the
global market place.
Though we are a millennium from becoming an 'inventor or
innovative society', there are certain aspects of our unique and
bio-diverse environment and indeed our own lives and work that
continue startling the industrialized scientific world from
which we as a nation can take full control of if and when we get
a precise picture of what IPR really is and its impact on
economic growth and development.
Due much to our colonial legacy and the fact that we are a third
world nation, PNG is without doubt a big 'copycat' society.
There is no argument otherwise, unless we begin identifying
where our comparative advantages are and seriously undertake
programs of developing these.
Our rich biodiversity continue to be the envy of the Western
industrialized world. It therefore is one area where there is
potential for IPR development if we are properly guided on how
to adequately exploit the opportunity.
Until the plight of the Hagahais of the Western Schraeder
mountains of Madang Province presented itself before us in
1995/96, IPR was not given the impetus to develop the way it has
been so far. It now dawned on us that IPR is something serious
and significant as a system of law unto itself regulating
commerce and industry and indeed determining friendly trading
relations among nations of the world and why it deservedly must
be given its rightful place if PNG were to exist and
inter-relate as a credible trading nation among its peers.
Again, thanks to a seeming act of modern day bio-piracy by a
bunch of American geneticists, virologists and a medical
anthropologist among them who were directly involved in the
entire Hagahai virus debacle that IPR, by its two branches -
Industrial Property and Copyright had become known to us in PNG.
Prior to 1996, IPRs most primitive form merely existed as an
adopted custom of English Common Law by way of the Trademarks
Act whose administration and management thereof occupied just a
little corner of the PNG Investment Promotion Authority (IPA)
structure under the overall ambit of the Department of Trade and
Industry. In 1978 an attempt was mooted for a Copyright Bill to
be an enacted law by Parliament which would have at least lent
discussion and understanding of 'copyright and related rights'
as one branch of IPR. However for reasons legitimate and
justified at that time, heavy lobbying especially by the
education sector prevented the 1978 Bill from being realized as
our own education system was heavily reliant on 'free'
copyrighted materials from particularly Australian and British
writers and owners of intellectual materials that our school
system depended on as an extended service of the colonial
legacy.
I began crusading for the Hagahais in 1996 merely as a response
to a snippet in the National newspaper drawing readers'
attention to a scurry act by PNG-based United States scientists
then attached with the Goroka-based PNG Institute of Medical
Research (PNGIMR) in whisking away by helicopter 'blood samples'
drawn from a male Hagahai tribesman consigned for highly
specialized genetic culture collection laboratories overseas.
These scientists were collaborating with the US National
Institute of Health (NIH), a premier US scientific establishment
dealing with genetics and biotechnology research world wide,
particularly in third world locations.
My imagination was obviously baffled by questions running
through my mind at that time as to why on earth would a pint of
blood from a PNG tribesman become all of a sudden the envy of
scientists of impeccable reputation ever worth the whisk and
indeed a rush helicopter ride out of the jungles of PNG.
Coincidentally, I was undertaking an investigative journalism
course at the University of Papua New Guinea and thought, the
fate of the Hagahais presented an obvious project opportunity.
As I seized on the prospect and advanced my findings, the blood
trail led me all the way to the US Government's P4 Laboratory at
Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the cell line was being kept for
further scientific analysis at the American Type Culture
Collection (ATCC).
As a Foreign Service Officer employed by the Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade at that time, there was no question
about my sense of sovereignty and why I had believed the Hagahai
blood sample bearing the patentable virus isolate is utmost
sovereign property owing to the fact that it was drawn from an
unsuspecting tribesman barely years from a stone age life. To
find out what and why this pint of blood was doing in a US
laboratory that is renown to have been used during the height of
the Cold War era as a Top Secret Chemical and Biological Weapons
laboratory and housing also the Kuru, HIV/AIDS, Small Pox,
Polio, and other deadly viruses known to mankind was naturally
my call for national duty. I had sworn to defend at whatever
cost with limited knowledge of science in me the life of PNG
citizens at risk as well as the interest of my country.
As I fathomed the depth searching to establish what had prompted
this scurry, I realized there were even bigger issues relating
to IPR that equally need intervention by the state. Amidst an
unenlightened professional fraternity, I was haunted by the
plethora of issues the Hagahai cell line patent was throwing
before me and the country.
Apart from relative sovereignty and the political issues, there
was associated economic, legal, medical, social and moral issues
that needed addressing that were beyond my call and capacity.
Issues such as prior informed consent; trusteeship; equity for
the Hagahais in the event the patentable scientific process is
commercialized; invention rights etc., whether or not foreign
scientists have a right to elect themselves 'inventors' of the
virus-based Hagahai cell line in a patent application that was
already in queue for assignment of patenting rights with the US
Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO).
Admittedly, in my haste to get some answers in an attempt to
block the patent application, I undertook to cut corners the 'yokomo
way' - short cuts, back to front and obviously racing against
time, much of it due to my own ignorance of what global patent
itself meant within the system of IPR and its relationship with
Industrial Property and Copyrights.
At Fort Dertrick, scientists had successfully isolated from this
PNG blood sample a certain unique strain of virus never been
found anywhere in the world that fulfilled all patentable
characteristics and qualities - non-obviousness, useful to
science and commerce and involved a scientific process
* The writer is a former Foreign
Service Officer and is currently General Secretary Peoples
National Congress Party
Next week: The Hagahai controversy
 
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