ABSTRACT
In a pending proceeding, the Foundation ‘France Liberté’ accused a French Institute for Development Research (IRD) of biopiracy after it applied for a patent on a molecule with antimalarial properties. The molecule was isolated from a traditional medicinal plant in French Guyana (Quassia amara) by exploiting the knowledge of local populations, but without acknowledging the Guianan communities. At the time of the research, no legal provisions required researchers to obtain prior informed consent from local authority and from local communities, neither did they require to sign a benefit-sharing agreement. While asking the European Patent Office to revoke the patent, the requesting party drew upon Article 53 of the European Patent Convention, pursuant to which European patents shall not be granted in respect of inventions the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to ‘ordre public’ or morality.
This chapter consists of a ‘latourian’ social study of ethnopharmacology from this textbook case. It shows that research and development, whose aim is to turn non-patentable raw material and local knowledge into a patentable subject matter, takes place in a world where human and non-human entities are so closely intertwined that it becomes well-nigh impossible to disentangle nature without humans from nature encompassing humans.
Ironically enough, the patent legal system is premised upon a naturalist cosmology claiming to distinguish what nature is and what it is not, what is an invention and what is only a discovery.
This chapter endeavours to show that this naturalist doctrine is out of breath and has proven unable to address the question of the fair benefit-sharing arising from the appropriation of an innovation consisting of an isolated gene or the purification of a chemical component or a molecule.
