Corn Wars
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
While the Melissa license is a bit unclear, Melissa aggressively
encourages free distribution of its source code.
Physically preventing people from "stealing" your genes is impossible in the long term. Only legal protection can work, and that is probably questionable in the long term too.
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00292.html
Getting a bag of GMO corn seed is not difficult. But reproducing said seed to the same level of quality is going to take you many years. It's a bit like trying to get a clone of yourself by having children with women: The kids will be a lot like you genetically, but it'll take you forever to make a clone.
So how do agricultural companies do this? By building special inbred varieties that have he same genotype as phenotype. All the offspring of crossing any specific pair of inbreds will be identical, and those are the offspring that you can buy at the store. The inbreds, who are also worse performing in the field, not so much: They are seen as trade secrets, and the companies just use them for research and manufacturing.
So it's not really about hiding the genetics of something you sell, or even hiding the genetics of something you use to create what you sell(which would still have some value, but still), but protecting the seeds of specific plants that are necessary to the manufacturing process.
If you give some corn breeders an entire bag of hybrid corn, and tell them to produce 1000 bags just like it, they'll ask you to come back in a decade or two. If you give them a bag of each of the inbreds that were use to make it,they will have the 1000 bags in a season. That's what agricultural companies try to protect.
Hmm, so let's play with Diffie-Hellplant. So you have two inbred genomes as two secrets, persisted as individual organisms. Alice and Bob negotiate on a public inbred genome that they pull from some kind of seed store (being careful to never re-use one they've used before!). Alice and Bob both create their own crossbreeds deterministically, from the secret organism and the public one. It's hard to get the private genomes from the two crosses, so they can send the seeds in the mail to each other.
After that, I'm not sure you can get two shared secret clones from the crossbreeds and the opposite private inbreeds. (ETA: Pretty positive you can't, though if anyone has any ideas along these lines, I'm eager to hear!)
Sounds like the start of some cypher-biopunk novel, though.
Relevant to the article, too. It's set in a post-carbon dystopian Bangkok, where giant agribusiness monopolies dominate the world through control of the food supply, including offensive bioengineering to create mutant plagues that destroy native crops and introduce dependency. The main character is an agent of one of these agricorps, whose mission is espionage against Thailand's central seedbank.
> So how do agricultural companies do this? By building special inbred varieties that have [t]he same genotype as phenotype.
Are you sure you have "the background"? What do you mean by this? Genotypes and phenotypes can't be said to be "the same" in any dimension; they cover completely different ideas. Possible genotypes are things like "A allele" or "G allele", where phenotypes are things like "tall" or "slimy".
If you mean that the company strains are all homozygous at certain locations of interest, and the seed they sell is heterozygous, that just means that you'll lose a certain amount of seed to quality issues when you breed your seeds directly. It also means you can trivially recreate the company strains by lifting chromosomes out of non-gamete cells. (Granted, I have no idea where the technology is for this -- it's cloning in the conventional "I have a biology lab" sense.)
If you mean that the company strains actually have just the one chromosome N times over for each chromosome, that's hard to believe. An animal would almost definitely immediately die with genetic makeup like that. But, again, genetic engineering could still do this. Also, there's no way the genetic information of these company strains could be considered "trade secrets", since it's all freely released to the public in the hybrid strains.
That is an interesting idea. Corn has 10 pairs of chromosomes. I wonder if you can tell for each pair, which one came from which parent? But then again, it shouldn't matter. As long as a set of 10, and its complement, both produce viable individuals, their offspring should be identical to the desired hybrid.
Now we just must not tell this to the Chinese...
For humans the chromosomes are marked in this way. I don't know about corn.
I'd like to read about this. Can you give a link (or just relevant words for googling), please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation
That's about as much as I know. Genomic imprinting is specifically to do with DNA that behaves differently depending on whether it's paternal or maternal. The most famous example of this "in real life" is Prader-Willi syndrome (mentioned in the imprinting article), in which the same genetic defect causes one of two radically different pathologies, depending on whether it came from the mother or father.
I think it's worth noting here that plant genetics is vastly more complex in basically every way than animal genetics.
If the harvested seed isn't the same as the sold seed what's the problem for the seed company?
(You can probably tell that my information comes from mostly anti GMO sources. But I'm not particularly anti GMO)
Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta et al. are easy boogeymen. So are pharmaceutical companies.
I mean, they're just like the *AA, trying to create artificial scarcity through draconian IP laws, no?
No.
You may argue about compensation, and whether they're using unfair market tactics or taking an excessive share of the profits created by their products. But when you boil it down, these companies are burning incredible amounts of money (and talent) to fuel R&D engines that are literally keeping humans alive.
Look at Monsanto's research pipeline:
http://www.monsanto.com/products/pages/research-development-...
http://www.monsanto.com/investors/documents/2015/2015.01.07_...
Those profits aren't just being pissed into the wind. These are extremely competitive industries, doing cutting edge science, with the goal of feeding and/or healing humans. How downright evil of them.
I'm probably just as suspicious about GMOs as the next guy, but I've yet to hear any of the anti-GMO / anti-Big-Ag crowd propose a feasible solution for how we're going to keep pace with a ballooning world population. Farm to table or heritage variants don't feed the world. And it's just not cheap to (a) make something useful & (b) make sure it doesn't kill anyone.
If you think Big Ag is a problem, try imagining what a world with steadily declining food security looks like in terms of stability.
End result? Yes, protecting the golden goose so that it can keep laying eggs merits some extraordinary protections. Although, like everything else, I'm perfectly willing to debate on whether those are not-enough, just-right, or too-far. But I don't see how "none" gives us a very nice future.
There's this idea that certain classes of activity are "too important" for profit-motive to be allowed. Education, healthcare, science, and agriculture usually fall in the line of fire. These people cheer on the companies that make their money in advertising or solving first world problems and demonize those that work on the capital-intensive problems in healthcare, science, or agriculture. Then they loudly complain about how the best of the best are going into the wrong lines of work. It's bonkers.
Moral tale: my brother was at the top of his class at an Ivy-league school and got his degree in physics. He did lab research on nanotechnology since high school. He seriously considered getting his PhD in physics. I counseled him to go to Wall Street instead, which he did. Now he makes a bunch of money and couldn't be happier.
What's my point? Getting a PhD in a hard science should be a license to print money like going into advertising or finance. Until that's true, you're not going to get the allocation of social resources you want. And government research isn't a solution to that. You'll never make a bunch of money working for the government. And if e.g. the government lets people keep the patents on research that's initially publicly-funded, so they can make a bunch of money on the endeavor, then the aforementioned people will demonize that as evil.
Taking healthcare for example, the incentives of the buyers (patients) and sellers (doctors) are inherently conflicting, as the former seek health, while the latter benefit when the former are sick. Furthermore, the patients very often urgently need help and don't have the time (nor the knowledge) to "shop around".
Or education. The "value" of a college is the increase in lifetime income vs. a high-school education, but given the slow feedback cycle (30 years or so of working) the market equilibrium is trending towards the price of college being the discounted value of all discretionary income of the graduates. This is aided by the US government that guarantees the loans and prevents them being discharged in bankruptcy.
A similar field is also infrastructure.
None of these fields must inherently be constrained by the government, but they need to be regulated in such a way that a free competition is encouraged.
That's trivially true of almost every market. People want food but restaurants benefit when the former are hungry!
People getting sick is not a basic need unless you are a healthcare company. That's why the incentives are conflicting.
Getting hungry again happens naturally regardless of the choice of food offered by a restaurant.
Whether you remain sick, are cured, or get sick again depends significantly on the choice of treatment offered. Healthcare companies have an incentive to choose treatments that don't cure you.
Individual humans may have other things that motivate.
I can say with absolute certainty that this is not the case. Funding is available for basic science only; the very difficult work of bringing genetics to market is simply not funded. Funding for research into e.g. drought resistance is limited to understanding genetic pathways. The closest you get to useful traits is QTL analysis. Make no mistake, this is very useful, foundational research. It enables a variety of approaches to creating new crops. It does not, however, create them.
Public funds should be used in this way. We should bring back seed banks, co-ops, and fund grants that actually aim to bring marketable traits to useful inbreds. I'd love to be able to point to GM intra-poaceae drought-tolerant corn and say, "this is what transgenics are capable of!" That's not the reality, though.
And, according to another FPP today[1], they're bilking us for a lot of these "wonder" drugs.
John Green has a good video on this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-2q-QMUIgY
Only half joking: By not feeding the ballooning of the world's population. Population growth was sustainable for most of history, then we eliminated scarcity and, well, we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance.
Untrue. Most of the parts of the world with the most resource abundance have very low or negative natural growth rates, with the overall growth in those areas driven by immigration from places with less abundance rather than natural increase, and we have very good information that strong social support networks promote reduced rates of natural population growth. We know quite well how to control growth in the context of resource abundance.
"The intent of the U.S. government to use food as an ever-more powerful point of leverage to wield over large, increasingly hungry nations like China. The prosecution of Mo Hailong and his circle stands as a warning to the Chinese government, issued through its proxy companies. The ears in the field, the seeds in the ground, even the pollen on the wind, are American-owned and American-protected. They are available to the world as food only if you agree to our conditions and are willing to pay our price."
And the US, as the only superpower (1) has many ways of making other nations to comply.
One nice example, related to the GM food and the EU opposition of it, can be extrapolated from the links:
June 2003:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jun/24/gm.food
"Mr Bush's comments came barely a month after his administration took Europe's ban on GM crops to the World Trade Organisation, saying the moratorium was a barrier to trade."
Just a little later:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/02/gm.food2
"The European parliament today lifted the ban on genetically modified foods, instead choosing to impose a strict labelling regime that could stave off a trade war with the US."
------
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/trade_matters_10_14...
Here is the link to the page linking to the pdf
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/reports/3152/trade-matter...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...
In short, if the farmer would select only the plants that survive the herbicide (effectively only those that over cross-pollination get "Monsanto" genes), they could sue him, and they did sue Schmeiser (and the farmer would probably lose as in the given example "The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto's patent" and the farmer lost).
But if the farmer has just the "trace amounts of GMOs" in his crops they wouldn't (and they "will pay to remove any of its GMOs from fields where they don't belong."(!))
The myth as stated in the article is "Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen." Note "traces". Only that is a myth.
But that they sue when somebody sows the seeds with the genes from their seed that he hasn't bought from them, even if he obtained them by cross-pollination, it happened, they sued, and they won the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser#Monsanto_v._Sc...
"In 1997, Percy Schmeiser found Monsanto's genetically modified “Roundup Ready Canola” plants growing near his farm. He testified that he sprayed his nearby field and found that much of the crop survived, meaning it was also Roundup Ready.[2] He testified that he then harvested that crop, saved it separately from his other harvest, and intentionally planted it in 1998.[2] Monsanto approached him to pay a license fee for using Monsanto's patented technology without a license. Schmeiser refused, claiming that the actual seed was his because it was grown on his land, and so Monsanto sued Schmeiser for patent infringement on August 6, 1998.[2]"
Nobody disputes that it was a case of cross-pollination. He was sued for keeping the results of that cross-pollination. Why shouldn't he if he didn't use the seeds from Monsanto but his own?
Edit: I see that the other suit[1] was not cited. In the Monsanto v. Schmeizer suit, he was accidentally planting Monsanto seeds that he had harvested, and did not mount a sufficient defense against it.
"Schmeiser supporters argued that his account still leaves open the possibility that the harvesting and replanting of Roundup Ready canola from the sprayed region was accidental and resulted from a miscommunication between Schmeiser and his farmhand, or from a failure of Schmeiser to have the presence of mind to instruct his farmhand to avoid taking canola seed for replanting from the sprayed region."
He knowingly used Monsanto seeds in his crops, but thought that using the seeds would not be theft because he didn't apply RoundUp to them. That's like suggesting that if I steal a Tesla roadster, but convert it to a gasoline engine, then I haven't stolen it.
Again though, I don't see this as terribly controversial, unless I'm missing something.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
Edit: That first sentence came out unintentionally snarky, but I can't think of a better way to put it, so please understand that no snark was intended.
And are you saying that I don't respect intellectual property, if I disagree with the previous flawed analogy? Many people who respect intellectual property don't agree with it: just look at the reactions of experts to the various "Piracy is theft" PR campaigns.
It was not my intent to imply that you did not respect IP, just that I do, and to me, the theft of an album is on equal moral footing with the theft of a car (though, commensurately less so, given the value). As, to me, they are the same, the analogy worked to me.
I don't know what's terrible about the second analogy, but either way, the guy knowingly used seeds that weren't his, claiming at one point that its planting was a miscommunication, and that it should have been allowed due to lack application of RoundUp at another.
The case was not concerned with any accidental plantings, but focused only on those plants that he intentionally harvested and planted, claiming imaginary "farmer's rights" of ownership of anything that happens to be upon his physical property.
I'll refrain from coming up with another flawed analogy here, but it doesn't seem controversial to me that he lost because he did not present a legally valid defense to the Canadian court system.
If they had been cross-pollinated (and nobody proved otherwise) the seeds had been his all the time. If you'd do DNA sequencing of such seeds you'd see a different DNA from the Monsanto seeds. But Monsanto claimed that as soon as the seeds produce plant resistant to their herbicide he has no right to use his own seeds.
The software analogy were, the computer virus infests your document files because you surf the same sites as your neighbors who pay "Monsanto protection." The infected files contained only the text you wrote, after running the Monsanto scanner only the infected files remain on your disk, all others are deleted. You can't preserve, copy or edit the infected files anymore because Monsanto, which produced the virus, has a copyright on avoiding Monsanto virus scanner, so as soon as the files aren't deleted by the Monsanto scanner you can't keep your own files.
Doing it by mistake is one thing. But he clearly did it on purpose and was trying to win in court to get away with it.
Breeding is selecting your own seeds based on their properties, and Schmeiser was a breeder.
In May 2003, the Center for Food Safety embarked on a project to determine the extent to which American farmers have been impacted by litigation arising from the use of patented genetically engineered crops. After extensive research and numerous interviews with farmers and lawyers, CFS found that Monsanto, the world’s leading agricultural biotechnology company, has used heavy-handed investigations and ruthless prosecutions that have fundamentally changed the way many American farmers farm. The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed.
The largest recorded judgment made thus far in favor of Monsanto as a result of a farmer lawsuit is $3,052,800.00. Total recorded judgments granted to Monsanto for lawsuits amount to $15,253,602.82. Farmers have paid a mean of $412,259.54 for cases with recorded judgments.
No farmer is safe from the long reach of Monsanto. Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else’s genetically engineered crop; when genetically engineered seed from a previous year’s crop has sprouted, or “volunteered,” in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year; and when they never signed Monsanto’s technology agreement but still planted the patented crop seed. In all of these cases, because of the way patent law has been applied, farmers are technically liable. It does not appear to matter if the use was unwitting or a contract was never signed
You can't stop people from doing anything, it's always about slowing them down and making it hard right?
5 minutes on the lock on your door might mean a non broken in house.
A day or two on the net for software or media might equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A month or two for genes might equal billions.
The extreme measures being taken to try to stop something that is impossible to prevent feels like a stunt, like posturing. As the article mentions, the genetic information is available to anyone driving down a road in Iowa or Illinois. The intellectual property paranoia focused on seed engineering companies feels very similar to the domestic patent legislation/litigation discussions of the past decade or so.
And here, its a no-brainer for the DOJ/FBI to go after this. It does Americans, not the rich or the poor not anyone, any good if the Chinese can use the fruits of our agricultural R&D for free.
The fact that it's easy to violate the patent rights of these agricultural companies is neither here nor there. I can drive over to Ted Turner's land in Montana and pitch a tent, and it'd probably be weeks before anybody noticed. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to eject trespassers from his land.
Ultimately, the U.S. has to ask itself a very hard question re: China. Do we want to be in a race to the bottom with them, or do we want to use whatever competitive advantages we have? The Chinese can grow corn as easily as we can. They can't genetically engineer corn like we do, unless they copy our technology. In the long run they'll get the technology--it's inevitable. But its in our self-interest to put that off as long as possible.
It does the Chinese a bit of good. Arguably, it's bad for some residents of the USA but humanity probably benefits overall. I have no sources for this claim.
> I can drive over to Ted Turner's land in Montana and pitch a tent, and it'd probably be weeks before anybody noticed. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to eject trespassers from his land.
We do have Squatter's Rights, but those usually take most of a decade to kick in. Do you think the laws around GM should have longer statutes of limitations?
> The Chinese can grow corn as easily as we can.
They have more of all of the same resources as we do - land, raw genetic material (crops), smart people, research facilities. But they apparently can't innovate. Why not? We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
The DOJ and FBI don't exist for the benefit of humanity. The American government is (and should be) solely concerned with advancing the welfare of Americans. Anything else would be an egregious violation of the social contract.
> We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
It's inevitable that China will develop the same ability to innovate as us. R&D success is ultimately a function of money and time. But in the meantime, they don't need to develop or ability to innovate if they can simply copy the results of our innovative process as we make them.
Opinions might divide on this one, but a case can be made that it would advance the welfare of Americans if the rest of the world didn't see Americans as total a-holes.
What good does our ability to innovate do, if the Chinese are there waiting at the end of the process to scoop up the fruits of those labours and use them free of the investment cost that it took to create them in the first place?
Like all trade, if the Chinese feel they can benefit from the fruits of foreign technology they're welcome to it. But not for free.
It's "conducting business" in the same way as way a parasite is a type of symbiote.
I'm not sure that China has more arable land than the US does.
> We should look to protect our innovative abilities, more than we protect their products.
Unfortunately, that's open source. (That is, the recipe is quite public.) Fortunately, very few societies seem to be willing to copy it. (Unfortunately, we seem to be willing to slowly degrade it...)
Your suggestion of "the history of the world" cuts open that term's torso and spills its entrails onto the street. ("eviscerates"? really? that was unnecessary.)
On a more substantive point, it's absolutely not a "no-brainer" for the FBI and DOJ to be using FISA court surveillance laws to prevent this. Even if they capture 9/10 of the people sent to gather seeds, which is generous, then it would only take a few dozen plane tickets and rental cars for Chinese corporations to steal all the information they need. Getting a few example cases into the courts so that we have high-profile proof is useful for state-level negotiation, maybe, but it's not going to prevent the theft.
And even patents only give you 20 years. After that, it's free to anyone, world wide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930
Like all patents, there are limitations, expiry dates, etc.
It's been around for nearly a century, yet we haven't arrived at the dystopian future yet.
If people were willing to eat primarily vegetarian, we'd be perfectly able to feed everyone with regular crops. The article even said as much...China's inability to feed its population stems from their love of meat.
They already are.
Or do you think maize and the current varieties of wheat, fruit trees, rice, and so on are natural?
Plant patents last for 20 to 30 years and are quite robust. The main exemptions are for seed saving (irrelevant for hybrid crops), use as a progenitor (irrelevant to transgenics which vary at a single locus), and for compulsory licensing.
With the exception of the latter issue, these aspects have no bearing on GM. Seed saving would be an issue in crops that typically are not grown as hybrids. However, utility patents are shorter in duration and require disclosure. There's nothing stopping someone else from going out to find germplasm with a similar trait and generating their own construct. With advances in technology, this becomes ever easier to do. The supreme court's ruling on the BRCA genes makes it quite clear that this is permissible and would not be restricted by a utility patent.
In my estimation, a utility patent is less restrictive.
What's more, there's also quite a nasty patent thicket covering the techniques used in creating GM crops, so you can't just dodge the problem by going out and creating your own GM plant. It's one of the reasons golden rice was doomed to fail - it requires patent licenses from something like 30 companies because of the techniques it uses, including all the big biotech corps. Its creator managed to get heavily restricted free licenses for them because it made a good PR weapon against anti-GMO activists (his explanation), but the conditions make it pretty much useless. Only subsistence farmers or countries which can't grow enough calories to feed their population are legally allowed to grow it, and out of the latter I think only the Philippines even has the right climate to grow rice.
Call it BRM: Biological Rights (read: Restrictions) Management.
Edit: after some googling, I need to read the stories suggested by tartuffe78. They look really good.
tartuffe78's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10081875
Terminator constructs exist, and yes, in corn too. They have useful applications, such as the restriction of transgenes from entering wild populations.
Think of terminator progeny like mules; they're simply infertile.
Fields for seed are far removed from productive fields. It's trivial to keep them separate from contamination; in fact, it's essential that this is done to make selfs or directed crosses.
Terminator was made to address concerns about transgenes entering the wild. Think of it like a mule; you still have offspring, but they're infertile. That's what terminator does. It cannot ruin a crop. Seed is still made and can be sold and eaten. It simply is infertile.
A construct was first developed by the ARS and USDA, and they were quite right to pursue this. It's a useful technology.
I have news for you: All apples of a certain variety (eg. all Granny Smith apples) originate from a single tree. They all originate from the same individual, same clone. Pieces of this tree have been grafted onto other trees and so on, and that is how all the Granny Smith (or any variety) in the world are produced.
To produce Granny Smith, you need a twig from a Granny Smith branch, and to graft that to another tree.
The is a fascinating read: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/heritage-appl...
Malthus would be proud of the people in this thread.
By the way, population isn't growing nearly as fast as it used to.
Also the answer to these problems is high-tech ultra-local subsistence farming (aeroponics/aquaponics/dwarf orchards in/on the home) and the seeds and other genetic enhancements should be open-source.
If we leave our food security up to a few giant American companies we are asking for trouble. We meaning the global population, which by and large is currently being fucked over by the system.
I'm not sure HN is the correct venue for discussions of small-scale ag, though. Many people online have bought into the corporate premise that small-scale agriculture cannot produce enough food. They tend to have studies backing their claims, while all I can show is an actual homestead, actually producing food.
To be honest, I've stopped caring what people online think. I'll keep just growing my own food, offline. If I am wrong, I am just sustainably feeding my family, using renewable energy instead of fossils fuels, and eating local organic food, all the while teaching my kids a good work ethic, for nothing.
How much land do you have under cultivation, what is your growing season, and how much water do you consume?
The fact that your farm can feed your family is not enough to show that your methods, if scaled up, could feed 315 million Americans (plus an unknown number of people we export to) on 914 million acres of farmland.
The fact that the argument also comes from corporations does not change its mathematics.
Crop research isn't free, and the government can't (or won't) afford to do it. Obviously the solution is to have companies fund the research and be expected to give it away to the world and not protect what they've created.
I wish people stopped the whole "monsanto is evil! GMO is evil!" bullshit, and start lobbying their government to fund public crop genetics research.