IP: US push to control world health

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Nathan Cochrane <ncochrane () theage fairfax com au>
Organization: The Age newspaper
Reply-To: ncochrane () theage fairfax com au
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 11:22:33 +1000
To: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: US push to control world health

An offer too bad to accept
June 14 2002

America's National Institutes of Health, with its budget of more than
$20 billion, has long been one of the more benevolent driving forces
behind medical research around the world. Recently, however, the NIH
gave notice that it intended to claim international rights over the
product of research by all foreign entities entering into NIH funding
agreements, which include "grants, cooperative agreements, contracts,
subgrants and subcontracts".

This is a broad net that would capture control of the output of many of
the world's leading medical researchers. Australian researchers, who
last year received about $15 million in NIH funds, are rightly dismayed.
The NIH's sole concession is that Australians would retain rights within
Australia and could request greater rights "on a case-by-case basis".

Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council, which does not
claim similar patent rights over projects it funds, has asked the NIH to
reconsider what it describes as a "substantial disincentive to future
international collaborations". It is not as if the US does not already
receive huge returns on its investments. For example, two cancer drugs
derived from research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute are worth
more than $1.5 billion a year to the US economy.

This is an issue with enormous commercial and public policy
implications, notably in fields such as stemcell research in which
worldleading Australian scientists receive NIH funding. Not only could
Australia lose potential earnings of billions of dollars from global
markets, Australians could surrender their say in how their knowledge is
disseminated and used worldwide.

Two years ago, an Australian consortium received $27 million in NIH
funding to develop an AIDS vaccine. Should it succeed, and were the new
policy to apply, the US interest in profiting from the vaccine might not
coincide with broader health interests. This was illustrated by
pharmaceutical giants' legal challenge to South African Government
efforts to provide cheaper versions of AIDS drugs, many of which arose
from publicly funded research.

Patents are not the issue, in so far as they protect and reward the
originators of intellectual property. The problem is the monopoly
control that some corporations already seek to exert worldwide, not
always responsibly, in many areas of medical treatment. The NIH's new
spirit of imperialism would exacerbate the problem.

For the US Government to assert a right to control the use of knowledge
generated by Australians in Australian facilities verges on an
infringement on our sovereignty. It may even be that, when funding is
offered on such terms, it should be refused.

Of course, that would require our governments to address funding levels
that have left the researchers so reliant on foreign money.



http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/13/1023864323027.html

-- 

Nathan Cochrane
Deputy IT Editor
:Next:
The Age and Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.next.theage.com.au



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