India hits back in bio-piracy battle

[Guest guest]

India hits back in 'bio-piracy' battle

 

 

By Soutik Biswas

 

BBC News, Delhi

 

 

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100

doctors are

hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying

in

information.

 

 

These doctors are practitioners of ayurveda, unani and siddha,

ancient Indian

medical systems that date back thousands of years.

 

One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is

wading

through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a

medicine

derived from the mango fruit.

 

"Soon the world will know the medicine, and the fact that it

originated from

India," she says.

 

With help from software engineers and patent examiners, Ms Kala and

her

colleagues are putting together a 30-million-page electronic

encyclopaedia of

India's traditional medical knowledge, the first of its kind in the

world.

 

'Bio-piracy'

 

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital

Library,

will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country's traditional medicine

in five

languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an

effort to

stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.

 

The electronic encyclopaedia, which will be made available next

year, will

contain information on the traditional medicines, including

exhaustive

references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original

texts.

 

Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they

describe

as "bio-piracy" for a long time.

 

"When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one

will be able

to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions.

Till now, we

have not done the needful to protect our traditional wealth," says

Ajay Dua, a

senior bureaucrat in the federal commerce ministry.

 

Putting together the encyclopaedia is a daunting task.

 

For one, ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are

in Arabic

and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language. Material from

these texts

is being translated into five international languages, using

sophisticated

software coding.

 

The sheer wealth of material that has to be read through for

information is

enormous - there are some 54 authoritative 'text books' on ayurveda

alone, some

thousands of years old.

 

 

People outside India are not aware of our immense traditional

knowledge wealth

 

VK Gupta, project director

 

Then there are nearly 150,000 recorded ayurvedic, unani and siddha

medicines;

and some 1,500 asanas (physical exercises and postures) in yoga,

which

originated in India more than 5,000 years ago.

 

Under normal circumstances, a patent application should always be

rejected if

there is prior existing knowledge about the product.

 

But in most of the developed nations like United States, "prior

existing

knowledge" is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is

available

on a database - not if it has been passed down through generations

of oral and

folk traditions.

 

The irony here is that India has suffered even though its

traditional

knowledge, as in China, has been documented extensively.

 

But information about traditional medicine has never been culled

from their

texts, translated and put out in the public domain.

 

Litigation

 

No wonder then that India has been embroiled in some high-profile

patent

litigation in the past decade - the government spent some $6m alone

in fighting

legal battles against the patenting of turmeric and neem-based

medicines.

 

In 1995, the US Patent Office granted a patent on the wound-healing

properties

of turmeric.

 

Indian scientists protested and fought a two-year-long legal battle

to get the

patent revoked.

 

Last year, India won a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent

Office

against a patent granted on an anti-fungal product, derived from

neem, by

successfully arguing that the medicinal neem tree is part of

traditional Indian

knowledge.

 

In 1998 the US Patent Office granted patent to a local company for

new strains

of rice similar to basmati, which has been grown for centuries in

the Himalayan

foothills of north-west India and Pakistan and has become popular

internationally. After a prolonged legal battle, the patent was

revoked four

years ago.

 

And, in the US, an expatriate Indian yoga teacher has claimed

copyright on a

sequence of 36 yoga asanas, or postures.

 

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth

encyclopaedia

project and heads India's National Institute of Science

Communication and

Information Resources (Niscair), reckons that of the nearly 5,000

patents given

out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year

2000, some

80% were plants of Indian origin.

 

Practitioners of traditional medicines say their importance cannot

be denied -

according to the WHO, 70% of the people living in India use

traditional

medicine for primary health care.

 

Also, some 42% of the people living in the US and 70% of the people

living in

Canada have used traditional medicines at least once for treatment.

 

By one estimate, a quarter of the new drugs produced in the US are

plant-based,

giving the sometimes much-criticised practitioners of alternative

traditional

medicine something to cheer about.

 

The mammoth Indian encyclopaedia may finally give alternative

medicine the shot

in the arm it sorely needs.

[Guest guest]

In einer eMail vom 14.12.2005 04:39:22 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt

daniel7alfa:

 

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100

doctors are

hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying

in

information.

 

 

this is really a very good news.

Expecting the appearance of the big work of indian med-sadhus

iren from germany