Report From Panama 3rd-world Healing Resources Medicine's New Frontier?

One can look to United Nations statistics, which say that in 1993 global commerce in pharmaceutical plants discovered by indigenous peoples amounted to a $43 billion business.

This month the inatuledis - practitioners of traditional Kuna tule healing- will host an international indigenous health care givers' meeting. The exchange of knowledge at the gathering in Panama will be as important a dialogue as takes place in any western medical convention. But the shamans of different indigenous healing traditions also share certain professional problems that MDs don't. In fact, the latters' system often creates the formers' worst problems.

Western-style doctors sometimes sniff about "quackery" and call indigenous healing "practicing medicine without a license." Last year there was flap in Panama when an inatuledi in an urban Kuna enclave lost a patient to asthma. Some doctors and politicians used it to argue that tule should be suppressed. But Panama's indigenous people responded in one scornful voice, asking their critics if they claimed that nobody ever dies of asthma while under western-style medical care.

But indigenous healers now face a more insidious threat, one which presents itself with a friendly face. Drug companies, realizing that the world's traditional pharmacopia includes a lot of things that work very well, send anthropologists, botanists and doctors to learn the ancient wisdom that indigenous healers have to teach. Then they take that knowledge back to the industrialized world and the companies patent it.

Sometimes the industrialized world's doctors and scientists go several outrageous steps beyond. In 1993 a U.S. government agency tried to patent the genetic information contained in a blood sample extracted from a 26-year-old Ngobe (Guaymi) woman from Western Panama. A researcher from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) drew the blood three years before, and tests indicated that the woman had an hereditary defense against HTLV-2, a virus associated with leukemia and degenerative nervous disorders. So the NIH moved to patent the woman's genes, without telling her.

An activist with a non-profit group that promotes Third World agricultural development stumbled across the patent application while looking for something else, and informed Isidro Acosta, president of the Guaymi General Congress. On behalf of the Ngobe nation, Acosta called the idea of patenting human genes "fundamentally immoral" and demanded that the blood sample be returned and the patent application be withdrawn.

Acosta at first got no satisfaction from the U.S. government. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was the point man in this dispute and other similar ones involving genes from people in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. "Subject matter relating to human cells is patentable," Brown argued to Solomon Islands officials. So Acosta appealed to various authorities, including to a board set up under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT).

The GATT panel decisively rejected the Ngobe claim. They held that human genes can be patented and that member countries have to enforce those patents. It was the international trade equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, the recognition of property rights over human beings.

Copyrights and patents are important in a university town like Ann Arbor. Creative thinkers rightly want to keep others from appropriating their labor without paying for it. But the U.S. government's campaign to get other countries to respect intellectual property rights presents complex ethical issues that deserve scrutiny and debate.

It sure has sparked a debate down here. Panama wants to join GATT, so it recently passed its first meaningful copyright and patent laws. To the delight of musicians, authors, video producers and software companies, it may put the country's notorious pirates out of business. To that extent, creative Panamanians can agree with their U.S. counterparts.

But on a range of intellectual property issues, there are objections to the lines that the U.S. would have the whole world draw. The Kunas think that if Disney can prevent people from making the unlicensed commercial use of a form of expression known as Mickey Mouse, the Kuna commonwealth ought to enjoy the same rights over a reverse applique form of expression known as the mola. And the Ngobe are offended by the NIH's claimed right to what flows in their veins.

The notion of patenting genetic information raises perverse questions. If a woman with patented genes bears children, can she be charged royalties? Can the patent holder prevent her from donating blood to the Red Cross?

In the end, it all looked too sordid, and the NIH withdrew its patent claim on the Ngobe woman's DNA. But the applications for patents on genes from people in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands are still pending.

But to return from the bizarre to the more usual threat, what about a based medicine that inatuledis- or herbalists from another tradition - have used for centuries? How dare western-style scientists go into a patent office and claim to have "invented" it? How come such applicants are not routinely dismissed as charltans?

Such audaciously fraudulent claims of "invention" are necessarily founded upon racist assumptions. The white man's scientific system is defined "valid" and other systems of knowledge by definition aren't. It's akin to the mistaken idea that societies with no writing - but which pass down knowledge over the generations through persons with eidetic memories - have no intellectual life or educational system.

By this way of thinking one who learned about a plant's medicinal properties within the Kuna language and the tule system of classifying knowledge is ignorant. Only knowledge learned in school, proven in a western-style lab and classified according to the industrialized world's system counts.

By such mental sleight of hand, multinational drug and chemical companies and the scientists that they hire use the patent laws to steal the intellectual property of indigenous peoples. What's the result? Many of the industrialized world's drugs - and the pharmaceutical companies' profits - come from rain forest plants, but the traditional healers who led the drug companies' scientists to this knowledge have nothing to show for it.

If one buys the legal argument that the product of one's original mental labor is a piece of property just like a stereo or a quarter-acre on Hill Street, and if one looks at real economic values, then it should be readily apparent that millions of dollars in intellectual property will be walking around in the heads of the participants in any successful gathering of the rain forests' traditional healers. To put it another way, whenever an inatuledi or practitioner from one of hundreds of other traditional healing systems dies without having passed his or her knowledge to a younger generation, it's like a medical library burning down. Or one can look to United Nations statistics, which say that in 1993 global commerce in pharmaceutical plants discovered by indigenous people amounted to a $43 billion business.

So when the indigenous healers gather in Panama, they won't simply be defending their honor against overt foes who consider them ignorant savages. They will be fighting for what's theirs in a high-stakes property dispute with powerful corporations. And outside observers who profess a respectful interest in learning about indigenous ways are likely to be looked upon with suspicion.

Eric Jackson, an Associate Editor of AGENDA, filed this report from Panama, where he has been living since February, 1994.