Who owns indigenous people's DNA?

• Author: Bright, Chris
• Position: Deoxyribonucleic acid

Aboriginal leaders have long struggled to control native lands. Now some have begun to worry that they may have to fight for control of native genes.

In August 1993, Pat Mooney, the President of Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a non-profit concerned with third-world agriculture, discovered that the U.S. government was trying to patent a cell line derived from a 26-year-old Guaymi woman. The Guaymi people are native to western Panama. The cell line, a type of culture that can be maintained indefinitely, came from a blood sample obtained by a researcher from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in 1990. The application claimed that the cell line might prove useful for the treatment of the Human T-lymphotropic virus, or HTLV, which is associated with a form of leukemia and a degenerative nerve disease.

RAFI notified Isidro Acosta, President of the Guaymi General Congress, who demanded that the United States withdraw its claim and repatriate the cell line. Acosta also appealed to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and to an intergovernmental meeting on the Rio Biodiversity Convention. But GATT does not forbid the patenting of human material, and Acosta's case before the Biodiversity Convention fared no better. The convention does provide for sovereign rights over genetic resources, but the meeting did not rule on whether the Guaymi cell line came within its jurisdiction. As a growing number of nongovernmental organizations voiced their disapproval, however, the United States dropped its patent claim last November.

The story might have ended there had not a European researcher uncovered two similar claims in January of this year. Miges Baumann, an official at Swissaid, a Swiss NGO that supports rural initiatives in developing countries, discovered that the U.S. government had filed applications on a cell line derived from the Hagahai people of Papua New Guinea, and another from the Solomon Islanders. These lines might also prove useful for treating HTLV. Baumann's discovery came as a shock to the governments concerned but despite their protests, the U.S. has refused to withdraw the applications. In a letter dated March 3, 1994, Ron Brown, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, explained the U.S. position to a Solomon Islands official. "Under our laws, as well as those of many other...