Innovation Meets Red-Tape Barrier

In some minds, Orville Vogel deserved the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize as much as the scientist who received it, Norman Borlaug.

Borlaug had developed high-yield wheats that allowed hunger-stricken Third World countries to achieve dramatic crop increases - the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s. He couldn’t have done it, however, without access to varieties Vogel developed at Washington State University.

Those were more collegial times. Less guarded times.

Today’s research climate is dominated by patents and royalties and permeated with secrecy. Borlaug, Vogel and their contemporaries would be chagrined. Maybe the advances they contributed could still occur, but the beneficiaries would be life-science companies and their shareholders, not farmers, consumers and starving masses.

Vogel spent a career cross-breeding wheat varieties, laboring cooperatively with colleagues, knowing that each hard-won success would prevail for only a few years before new strains of disease came along to undermine it.

He retired in 1972, lamenting a decline in public funding for research and pleading for a reversal.

Gene-splicing was still beyond the horizon then. So was a string of dubious court and administrative rulings that have made genetic research a commercial gold mine.

WSU has a rich agricultural research heritage. Vogel was followed by Clarence “Bud” Ryan, the first WSU scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He isolated plants’ internal defense mechanism against pests.

Today, unfortunately, economic roadblocks hamper public-sector scientists who would pursue the kind of work that made Vogel and Ryan heroes to Inland Northwest farmers and Borlaug a world-acclaimed humanitarian.

Before today’s researchers can dip into the gene pool, which once was readily accessible, they have to pay prohibitive royalties to the companies that own the patents.

Soon, warns Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Biotech Century,” the only option for dedicated researchers at land-grant universities like WSU will be to violate their public mission and cut deals with the biotechnology profiteers.

In some ways, it sounds appealing. Why spend tax dollars on research if the marketplace offers incentives for private interests to do the work?

But the incentives rest on shaky ground.

Historically, patents could not be obtained on life forms, which were considered discoveries of nature.

That’s why the U.S. Patent Office denied GE’s application in 1980 for a patent on an oil-eating microbe. The company finally won, however, because the appellate court’s majority thought the bacterium in question resembled detergent more than a form of life.

Seven years later the patent commissioner in the Reagan administration declared that any life form biotechnologists might come up with could be patented except full-birth human beings.

These changes in law and policy haven’t been as rapid as those in science but they have been almost as radical. All of this has happened with little if any examination by Congress, presumably the nation’s public-policy gatekeeper.

If the public-research legacy of Orville Vogel and others is to survive, it will be up to Congress to initiate an overdue examination of current patent law and make whatever modifications are needed.