20-2 Genes, People and Property

Whose Property, Whose Rights?

On a brisk, sunny afternoon in October 1993, Isidro Acosta, lawyer and President of the Guaymi General Congress, met in Geneva with Adrian Otten, the senior GATT official responsible for "GATT TRIPs." GATT, of course, is the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. "TRIPs" is the little-known "Trade Related Intellectual Property" Agreement, which was then being negotiated by governments from…

Value of Life: Saving Genes versus Saving Indigenous Peoples

When first approached to contribute to the debate on the patenting of human genetic resources or cell lines, the first thing that came to my mind was the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) which proposes to take genetic samples from endangered indigenous people in order to uncover and utilize their genetic secrets. This project, we are told, is in its development stage and has yet to start its…

Trickle Up in China

Huang Jiafeng, a woman in the village of Wanjiaba in China's Yunnan Province, lives with her family to five who farm for a living. For years, they were very poor, and they were barely able to meet their food and clothing needs. However, in 1989 they received a small conditional grant from a nonprofit organization known as the Trickle Up Program. With this aid, Jiafeg started a business growing…

The Yuchi Community and the Human Genome Diversity Project: Historic and Contemporary Ironies

The Yuchi Community and the Human Genome Diversity Project: Historic and. Contemporary Ironies On October 14, 1993, Professor John H. Moore, chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of Florida and a member of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), addressed a broadly representative group of Yuchi (also spelled Euchee) community members in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, in order to introduce…

The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide

The 1994 Rwandan holocaust has now joined other wars of the twentieth century to bear witness to the human potential for inhumanity. After the journalistic and human rights publications, this is the first English book-length presentation and analysis of the conflict, its background, and immediate aftermath. Prunier is a historian at the French national research center (CNRS) who has spent recent…

The Garifuna Journey

The Garifuna Journey is a project organized by the Garifuna community of Belize and directed by Andrea Leland and Kathy Berger. The focus of this project is to assist the ongoing efforts of the Garifuna to educate their people about their history and cultural traditions, and create an archive of materials, that to date, is limited. Descendants of African and Carib Indian ancestors, the Garifuna…

Science and Sensibility

Indigenous peoples have for centuries suffered at the hands of those who conquered their territories. No that colonialism is in disrepute and the major world empires are in dissolution, it is tempting to think that those suffering were regrettable aspects of a bygone are; but the descendants of those who suffered still carry with them a vivid recollection of what happened all too recently, and…

Practitioner and Expert in Dialogue: A Key to Resource Conservation

The That desert of western India remains one of the most densely populated, yet traditionally used, arid and semi-arid regions in the world. This density of population is made possible through a heritage that literally reshapes the landscape to harvest the scant rainfall. On the Thar's eastern margin in the Aravalli Hill the progressive construction over the centuries of levees, berms, ponds,…

Perspectives from Papua New Guinea

The Papua new Guinea Institute of Medical Research is a statutory body of the Papua New Guinea government, set up to conduct research on diseases and health problems relevant to the people of Papua New Guinea. It was established in 1968 but almost became defunct at National Independence in 1975. In the last 20 years it has built up programs in research on pneumonia, malaria, typhoid, sexually…

Pastoralists at the Periphery: Herders in a Capitalist World

This book contains papers read at a conference: "Pastoralists and Markets: The Articulation of Pastoralism with the Nineteenth Century World Economy," held in 1987. The book was published in 1994; on wonders why it took so long. Oh well, since it deals with the nineteenth century no times has been lost. In the introduction the editors remark that "these inhabitants of mountain and desert…

Native Americans, Scientists, and the HGDP

I joined the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) in 1992 to help select those Native North American societies which were the most interesting, from an historical standpoint, and might benefit from a genetic analysis to determine their historical relationships to other Indian people. One interesting group, for example, is the Yuchis (also spelled "Euchees"), culturally and linguistically…

Genes, People, and Property: Furor Erupts over Genetic Research on Indigenous Groups

Genes, People, and Property: Furor Erupts over Genetic Research on. Indigenous Groups During the past twelve months, two scientific endeavors that concern indigenous people - the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Hagahai gene patent case in Papua New Guinea (PNG) - have gained remarkable notoriety, but remain poorly understood. The articles in this issue provide an overview of the projects…

Genealogy, Sacredness, and the Commodities Market

From the time the first European vessels reached the shores of continents long inhabited by indigenous peoples, European colonists adopted a terra nullius world view. "Our lands were declared vacant by papal bulls you created to justify the pillaging of our lands" (Chief Oren Lyons. Onondaga 1993). Only very recent has the world begun to concede the inaccuracy of and racism behind this view.…

Burma Update

Indigenous ethnic minorities make up approximately one-third to one-half of the population of Burma. Despite their large numbers, these indigenous groups are subject to continual attacks under the oppressive regime of The State Law and Order Council (SLORC). Military offensives against these ethnic minorities have not relented as the ruling junta appears to have adopted a policy of "Burmanization…

Biological Diversity is Inherent in Humanity

The Human Genome and the Human Genome Project Humans have about 75,000 different genes. They are made of a chemical known as DNA. Each gene is composed of a string of thousands of modular chemical building molecules, called nucleotides, of which there are four different types. Genes, in turn, are connected by the thousands in bead-like fashion into 23 larger molecular structures known as…

Indicators from Ju/'hoan Bushmen in Namibia

Namibia, formally called Southwest Africa, was once colony of both Germany and Britain and then part of South African until 1990. With Independence, the incoming majority-rule government faced a stiff challenge of establishing new democratic relations of power from the complex colonial legacy of racial the ethnic stratification. The Ju/'hoansi (!Kung, Ju/Wasi) Bushmen are a population of Khoisan-…

Genes, Patents, and Indigenous Peoples: Biomedical Research and Indigenous Peoples' Rights

The revolution in the last few decades in molecular biology has given scientists an unprecedented understanding of how human bodies work, and fail to work, and fail to work, at the molecular level. The relationship between DNA, RNA, proteins, and human physical functions lies at the core of this understanding. In a simplified description of this relationship, DNA serves as the "master copy" of…

The National Institutes of Health: and the Papua New Guinea Cell Line

This article examines the factual events surrounding the development of two human cell lines infected with variants of the human T lymphotropic virus type-1 (HTLV-1). Further, this article will review and discuss the National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy under which the NIH applied for patents on these two cells lines. One patents covering one of these two cell lines was issued on March 14…