Green Genes Profit Motive Complicates Developing New Strains Of Grain

One of the hundreds of jars in Stephen Jones’ freezer could be worth a million dollars.

But he doesn’t know which one.

The Washington State University scientist may already have a variety of wheat that’s immune to a particular disease and could save wheat growers millions of dollars in herbicide applications. It may be sitting in one of the full-sized freezers in his lab in Pullman near Martin Stadium.

But in today’s scientific world finding the right variety is just not as simple as planting and testing seeds.

A veil of secrecy made heavy with money has fallen over grain research and biogenetics. And it’s a phenomenon that reaches from the largest industrial nations to the smallest rural countries.

Then and now

Years ago, the scientific world was more of an Eden where information and technology flowed easily through academic papers and symposiums. A discovery was quickly made public to draw credit to the inventor and to be expanded upon in other research.

One of the best examples was at WSU in the 1950s when renowned wheat scientist Orville Vogel created semi-dwarf, high yield wheat that was resistant to diseases. When released, Vogel’s varieties doubled grain yields, earning Northwest growers tens of millions of dollars.

His wheat was also instrumental in the work of U.S. scientist Norman Borlaug who won a Nobel Prize in 1970 for offering Mexican farmers a means to increase food production and avoid starvation.

Such advances might never happen today, critics of the patent blitz say.

Private chemical and seed companies with names like Novartis and Monsanto, with their scientists and flood of patents may have changed it all.

Now Jones has to obtain permission to use certain wheat DNA, and sometimes pay high royalties. In some ways, he’s being priced out of using the technology, he said.

“Genes are being locked up at an alarming rate,” Jones said. “We will not be able to develop wheats that are wanted or needed because we don’t have free and equal access to the genes needed to produce them.”

Also, when a company like Monsanto patents an idea, such as creating a wheat resistant to herbicides (that Monsanto develops), Jones is legally prevented from creating his own wheat varieties that are also resistant to the chemicals.

The secrecy now, even among public-sector scientists, restricts the flow of information.

For Vogel and his colleagues, that was never the case.

“He had this material that he developed in Pullman and he made it available to people all over the world,” said Charles Murphey, a national program leader in grain crop research for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The concern is, if we had had a patent arrangement at that time, they wouldn’t have felt as free to make these distributions of germ-plasm to fellow scientists.”

Jones, who now works in the Palouse test fields and laboratories where Vogel revolutionized the wheat industry, sees his path as much more complicated.

Patenting life

The first patent on a living thing - an oil-eating microbe - was approved in 1980.

Five years later, the U.S. Patent Office decided that plants, seeds and plant tissue could be patented.

And lately, in laying claim to intellectual property, the biotechnology area has heated up, particularly in the private sector, the USDA says.

“What’s happened - and it has been very shrewd of the industry - is they’ve spent the past 15 to 20 years habituating the public, including court justices, to the patenting of life forms,” said Philip Bereano, a University of Washington professor of technology communication. Bereano serves on the board of the Council for Responsible Genetics and is an adviser to the United Nations. “When it gets to court, it won’t seem as bizarre as it really is,” he said.

Bereano opposes the patenting of living organisms.

Scientists and private companies are taking ownership of public resources such as genes and making money, he said. If this continues, technological power will go to those with the most money and the most lawyers, he said.

The result is increased secrecy - in some cases a freeze on information until the patents are approved or until a company is ready to make money on the discovery. It could mean a future in which the largest companies will have monopolies on research and information. Farmers will be at their mercy, Bereano said.

Right now, growers in Douglas County benefit from Jones’ research on a wheat resistant to snow mold. Since the problem is specific only to certain parts of Washington, it’s not profitable for a private company to do the research, Jones said. That’s one reason it’s important to keep the public sector in the game, he said.

The WSU research foundation averages about 150 patents a year, about 20 of which are in biotechnology.

“We do lots of plant science. In that area, our patents have increased tremendously since 1989,” said Mirja Wilson, technology licensing officer for the university.

Since the school pays up to $10,000 for its biotechnology patents, it must carefully choose what to pursue.

A committee decides if the idea, the technology or the object is patentable. It’s a long, expensive process, but if the school doesn’t do it, the results of publicly-funded research could easily become the domain of the private companies.

Washington growers can buy WSU varieties for about $7 a bushel. By contrast, a chemical and seed company variety would cost about $20.

What’s worse, say some in agriculture, is that public research can be tweaked to serve a private company.

“They can take a variety that was bred at WSU, change a gene and it’s theirs,” said Gretchen Borck, director of issues for the Washington Association of Wheat Growers.

But according to companies like Monsanto, biogenetic research is expensive and patents are necessary to ensure a return.

“Why invest when there’s no protection?” said Karen Marshall, public relations director for Monsanto’s agriculture sector. “Growers definitely need new technology. They need the benefit of the research that private industry can bring forward, but then again private industry needs to benefit from the research as well.”

To keep up, universities are resorting to defensive patenting, Jones said. “My reaction is we better start talking about this so we’re aware that it’s happening,” he said.

The wheat frontier

Jones serves as chair of the National Wheat Crop Germplasm Committee, which advises the federal government on the acquisition, protection and distribution of wheat germplasm.

While the private companies seem to dominate research worldwide for corn and sorghum, much wheat research is still publicly funded.

But that doesn’t mean the chemical companies aren’t fast moving into wheat, Jones said.

“Wheat is the No. 1 calorie source in the world right now,” he said. “There are big dollars going to waste, as the companies see it.”

And, with the intervention of private companies, science is being slowed.

“There’s a restricted flow of genes worldwide,” said Jones, who has visited Russia and China to retrieve genes that could further his research.

In the past 20 years, countries such as India and Turkey have had scientists from chemical companies take home plant germplasm, patent it, then sell it back to Indian and Turkish farmers.

“Traveling and visiting laboratories and fields are much more restrictive than in the old days,” Jones said.

Fifteen years ago, he could have gone to Turkey and come away with a suitcase full of seed. “Today, you’d be shot,” he joked. At the least, you might be detained at the airport.

Bioprospecting - the practice of going into another country to find new plants and varieties - is done mostly in developing countries, said Wendy McGoodwin, executive director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a nonprofit watchdog organization.

“There have been some very troubling instances on the part of American plant scientists that involve … collecting germplasm, bringing it back to the United States and patenting those plants,” she said. The patents then bring royalties to the company or scientist, “yet those communities have nurtured those strains over time,” McGoodwin said.

A new world

The world of wheat has changed since Vogel’s day. What took him up to a decade to test and produce, now takes Jones about two years. Jones has use of a new $8 million greenhouse that doubles the speed of developing new varieties and can take seedlings through every season, regardless of the weather outside. Jones can create and test up to 60,000 varieties a year.

Vogel, who died in 1991, would have been delighted with some of the developments.

But he probably would have been troubled at having to keep his research under wraps. He wouldn’t like having to compare DNA fingerprints of his varieties to those of a private company’s. And he would be frustrated at the ever-diminishing flow of germplasm and information.

While developments in science and technology give Jones new tools to speed and improve his work, he faces more hurdles than Orville Vogel ever did.

Hannelore Sudermann can be reached at (509) 459-5419, or by e-mail at Hannelores@spokesman.com