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Comment by DirtyCalvinist | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those cases where the rights and interests of patent holders need to be balanced with the rights and interests of the public at large. Biotech crops are probably key to our survival and prosperity as a species on this planet and if anyone can simply grow some seeds and sell them, that will reduce/destroy the monetary incentive for creating new varieties of plants. (In some cases this does not matter, like corn and apples, because these plants do not breed true. But this is apparently not true of soybeans.) That incentive is what the patent system is ideally supposed to protect.

That said, Monsanto's ability/propensity to sue any farmer who breathes in a bit of their genetically modified plant material needs to be curtailed.

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Can you substantiate your claim that "Biotech crops are probably key to our survival and prosperity as a species"? There is little evidence supporting that that I can find.

Globally, we currently produce more food than we need. The problems we currently have around starvation and malnutrition appear from my limited research to be centred on distribution, comoditization and other socio-economic factors.

How do biotech crops (current or future) tackle these issues?

Golden rice is an example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

That's the most common rhetoric example used in science circles.

In real world, if those 670,000 people can't get enough food to get the basic nutrients, if they won't die from vitamine A deficiency, they will die of something else.

The problem of starvation is of social nature, not technological one. There's plenty of technology to save lots of people in those countries, as they're decades behind.

Remember some "produced food" is fed to other food to make meat. What would you say if vegetarianism was legally required?

That in general, we might be better off for it?

That said, it really has no bearing on this discussion. Currently companies do things like destroy perfectly good grains in an effort to prevent the price from dropping due to over-supply. Why? Because it costs money to store, so better to just destroy it. If we come up short later, then it's even more beneficial to the company because the price actually goes up!

That's not even touching the issue of Africa, where most 'aide' that is sent never makes it to the starving people due to political turmoil / warlords / etc.

I'm skeptical of claims that "food problems are just distribution, we produced enough food to feed everyone" claims, especially if it starts with "well, first everyone must switch to vegetarianism... easy!", and would need some convincing that it's possible to "end world hunger" without massive drastic changes.

Replying to this really late, but:

> The world's second-biggest cause of child mortality, diarrhoea, kills about 1.5 million children every year. Three-quarters of these deaths could be prevented with a simple course of oral rehydration salts (ORS) combined with zinc tablets, at a cost of just US$0.50 per patient.

For years we've[1] struggled to get this live saving cheap stuff to little dying children, and haven't succeeded.

Without any massive change - just a little bit of clever thinking, we use Coca Cola's desire to sell fizzy pop to everyone, and their delivery networks, to help ship ORS.

(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-...)

I agree with you about the "We just need to [...]" school of thought being hopeless.

I am very worried about corporations that are "key to our survival" and incentivized to break the cycle of life by producing species that don't breed true. Aren't you? If not, why not?

Apples naturally fail to breed true. Commercial varieties are cloned via grafting, starting from a single tree.

The popularity of hybrid corn is probably more due to the advantages that come from hybridization rather than any pernicious efforts by the producers. It's not like there are organized efforts to reduce the diversity of the seed stock that is available.

If species always "bred true", we'd all be single cell organisms huddled around some carbon rich undersea thermal vent.

I don't see how human genetic selection is morally inferior to natural selection, nor how human designed genetic recombination is morally inferior to random mutation.

I have no quibble with genetic modification. I have a quibble with a huge corporation that a) sues everyone back to the stone age and b) failing that, is highly incentivized to create new breeds with kill switches and phase the others out of the market.

OK. I just now scanned the original posting :-)

I didn't see anything about kill switches (for the seeds? although sterile fruiting bodies are nothing new to agriculture, and I can see why they might want to engineer this into their seeds now to avoid such occurrences in the future), although I did see stuff about producing newer hardier varieties.

They only want to sue because this one farmer is producing plants based on Monsanto's design patents (the design being based on genetic composition) without obtaining a license; which is exactly what you would expect a patent holder to do, regardless of whether its a large corporation or not.

I'll be interested to see what the Supremes do once they inject themselves.

if anyone can simply grow some seeds and sell them, that will reduce/destroy the monetary incentive for creating new varieties of plants

This is a similar argument to copyright law, which lots of us hackers are familiar with. Open Source software is software that everyone can copy all the time, and it has certainly been productive and innovative. Does that disprove your theory that without protections there will be innovation? (Or is this differnet?)

It won't destroy all incentives to innovation. Hence the word 'monetary'. But if someone can make billions of dollars from innovating, that will certainly be a spur to do it, right?

If you read that NYT article just yesterday on the enormous drag and waste caused by the current state of software patents, you'd sing a different tune. The log line is "software companies now spend more on patents than on R & D".

These particular incentives are warping the IP system out of control. They have huge downsides and now little upside (unless you hit the patent jackpot yourself and are willing to go sleazy).

It need not destroy all incentives to hurt innovation.

There are different factors in different fields. The downsides of software patents far outweigh any upside for innovation and should be done away with. Same for business method patents and most trade dress patents.

But designing and implementing an effective regime for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or biotech crops, is a different proposition. Unlike software or fashion or business, the products here are extremely expensive to develop and almost trivially easy to reproduce. In the case of pharmaceuticals, patent protection pays not only for the physical development of the drug, but also the trials of its efficacy and safety. (Yes, it's not exactly that simple) There have been proposals for replacing the current system in these cases, but none have struck me as effective or practicable.

The patent system is a wholly artificial creation, and as such, can be shaped to our collective whim. We can throw out software patents and business method patents and all other types of patents that destroy innovation while keeping those types that do fulfill their original purpose. We need not get rid of them all.

If biotech crops are indeed key to our survival then that is incentive enough. No monetary incentive is needed. In fact something "key to our survival" should not be allowed to be for-profit.

Although, I seriously doubt biotech is key to survival. It's more likely to encourage, overpopulation, resource depletion, and push us towards monoculture / susceptibleness to catastrophic disease / crop failure.

> In fact something "key to our survival" should not be allowed to be for-profit.

Why this knee-jerk suspicion of profit? Sure, Monsanto seems to be jerks, but it's not like non-profits never screwed anything up.

Food is key to our survival and it's produced and distributed mostly for-profit - this clearly shouldn't be allowed?

Because a profit-based market only works if supply/demand is elastic. In the case of, for example, healthcare, it becomes extremely inelastic [1] - at some point, if your life is at stake you could be willing to pay exorbitant prices for what should have a lower market cost (ie, say, blood at the right time).

Key-to-our-survival is a very strong leading indicator that the demand curve can get inelastic - giving inordinate bargaining power to private enterprises whose entire charter is to get as much money as possible (which makes sense given a normal elastic demand curve).

Healthcare, Energy, and Food should all be places where regulation prevents extreme arbitrage, or those doing the arbitrage will eventually be the de-facto rule-makers. If you want to live in such a society, fine, but I'd rather not. Note: some say we're already at this point, which is depressing to contemplate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

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