Remora

Limited Inc, like Ronald Reagan, has a repertoire of anecdotes we go back to obsessively. One of them is that penicillin was not patented by Ernst Chain, Howard Florey and Edward Abraham, the Oxford scientists who took Alexander Fleming's discovery, purified it, and made it medically useful.

What can and can't be patented is one of the burning questions of our time -- but it burns, admittedly, far beneath the average consciousness, which doesn't know a patent from a property right, and doesn't know the smell of smoke from the fire that produced it. Unfortunately, the conservatives are winning this argument by default -- there are very few voices crying out against the extension of monopoly, which is what a patent is, or the public/private partnerships that routinely rip the public off, for private benefit.

In Tom Paine, Stephen Jones publishes an article that illustrates the rip off. Since the article is about wheat seeds, there will be readers out there who will balk. But wheat seeds are important! (the hysterical man with the red face shouted). Here's the essential two grafs:

"What is wrong with universities working hand in glove with corporations to develop our food crops and getting a return on investment? One of the main issues is the ownership itself. Who owns wheat, for example? The food grain was first domesticated over 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. It is not native to this country and we would not be growing it here if we did not receive the help and genetic materials from farmers and public breeders worldwide.

A second issue is the restricted flow of information. Because of developing ownership issues, most international breeders are no longer willing to share material. This is hurting research. Now, many of the products researched by publicly-funded scientists in public labs are being developed under confidentiality agreements and with strict limitations on publication. Some 50 percent of public breeders said they had been hindered in seeking exchanges of genetic material, according to a 1999 University of Wisconsin poll. Twenty-five percent reported having difficulty in graduate student training and research because of this limited access."

Limited Inc has said this before, and will say it again: the difference between political factions does not have to do with the state. Although the right habitually oozes about the magic of the marketplace, what the right really wants is a completely contractualized world -- which requires an unheard of extension of state granted monopolies. The right wants to squeeze out the commons. The soviet variety of the left wanted the same thing -- wanted to identify the commons with the state. It is this commonality of goals that makes the ideal world of the right look so much like the real world of the soviet left. In both, social cost -- and with it an honest perception of the commons -- is locked in a closet. But social cost is the ideological ghost that will haunt our banquets of gene altered wheat seed -- believe us, reader.