Tags:
Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, JAN 2: For the first time, a top Government official has said that India needs to allow patenting of genes to protect intellectual property rights related to genes and genetic products. It is well known that the country is a treasure house of natural genes — from plants, animals or humans — but the subject of patenting has always been controversial.
The Indian Patent Act still does not permit the patenting of “live material or even biological material” though the current amendment that is pending in Parliament does give a concession for patenting of “micro-organisms.”“We would now like to permit the patenting of genes,” says Manju Sharma, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, on the eve of the Indian Science Congress which begins in Chennai tomorrow. Sharma is also president of the Science Congress.
Sharma’s statement comes at a time when even to talk about patenting genes has literally been a complete no-no. And the Patents Amendment Bill still fails to bring within its ambit thefast emerging areas of biotechnology and genetic engineering which some call the “real sunrise industry of the next millennium.”
“Rules and regulations should be modified so that new genes that Indians invent can get due protection within India,” says Sharma who is giving the presidential address on the focal theme of the current Science Congress: New Bio-sciences: Opportunities and challenges as we move into the next millennium.’
The Department of Biotechnology has already launched a countrywide research programme on genetics that includes the deciphering of the complete natural hereditary material or the genome of the “people of India.”
Similarly a separate initiative for plants, sets about unraveling the genome of important Indian varieties of crops like wheat and rice. The human diversity programme at a cost of about Rs 10 crore hopes to understand and utilize the “genomic diversity of the people of India,” more or less on the same lines as human genome programme launched worldwide.
Thisis obviously money-spinning science. The global human genome project is expected to be raking in about US $100 billion by 2005.
Sharma believes India too is in this race since “at least 20 outstanding groups of scientists” are onto similar programmes.
Watson to attend Science meet
A major attraction of this year’s Science Congress is Nobel Laureate Prof James Watson, who along with Sir Francis Crick discovered the structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), the genetic material of cells, to go down in the annals of science history as Watson and Crick’ duo.
Other key foreign participants include Dr Peter Raven, Prof Bruce Alberts from US-based National Science Foundation and Dr Philip Campbell, editor of the leading international journal Nature. India’s largest and most prestigious science gathering, which will also be this century’s last national science meet, is being hosted in the city after 48 years. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, scientific advisorto the Defence Ministry and former science minister Prof M G K Menon will address the meeting.
