Word: drugging
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KNOW WHOM YOU ARE TALKING TO. Vasella divides organizations into those that genuinely want a dialogue with his drug company--he mentions the famine-relief group Oxfam--and those, like many animal-rights activists, that don't. "Don't try to convert the unconvertible," he counsels. Talk to the "decent people" who respect different points of view. From the other side, Charles Secrett, executive director of Friends of the Earth UK, concedes that some activists believe talking to corporations is a sellout and only violent revolution will change the world...
Maria Lopez, 59, a tribal matriarch, assesses Royero's work with the eye of a seasoned businesswoman--and for good reason. She knows that if the plant has commercial value, Venezuelan law may soon give the Piaroa rights for compensation from drug companies, which would have to recognize what the community calls its intellectual property. In years past, says Lopez, "we always gave up our medicines without any economic gain for ourselves. We won't make that mistake again...
...laws are retroactive.) They also hope to make biocolonialism a key global trade issue at next month's meeting of the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. "This isn't about charity for Indians," says Royero, head of Venezuela's nongovernmental Science Development Foundation. "These drug companies have long been doing business with someone else's 'inventions,' if you will...
Some countries, including Costa Rica and the Philippines, force companies to pay millions of dollars for the right to "bioprospect" in their jungles. Others have significantly restricted researchers' access: Mexico recently canceled a $2.5 million, U.S.-led drug-prospecting project when Maya Indians in Chiapas complained. But Royero and the Venezuelan government are on the movement's cutting edge: they are developing an unprecedented, classified database of plants and animals that have commercial potential as medicines and foods. Companies that see a scientifically verified, patented discovery advertised on the database would pay--through the central government, to the appropriate tribe...
...take more than a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs for a company to market an effective drug from natural resources, and the big scores are rare. But they do happen. As many as a quarter of all prescription drugs today are linked to the kinds of indigenous discoveries that make Brazilian catuaba bark a rain-forest version of Viagra for the herbal-supplement crowd. Two of Eli Lilly's more successful cancer drugs, Velban and Oncovin, were developed from Madagascar's rosy periwinkle plant, found through a shaman some 40 years ago. In the 1990s...