St. Louis Post-Dispatch / 03/31/99
In this land of tailored suits, the scene Tuesday was extraordinary: Amazon medicine men adorned in shell necklaces and exotic bird feathers chanting a religious ceremony and sipping potions.
The tribal leaders achieved the real purpose of their long journey just before their depiction of a ceremony. They visited the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in suburban Washington to challenge the validity of a patent awarded a California entrepreneur for the main ingredient of their healing potion - the hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca.
"Our ancestors learned the knowledge of this medicine and we are the owners of this knowledge," said Antonio Jacanamijoy, who heads a council representing more than 400 tribes and indigenous groups in South America.
Ayahuasca (pronounced eye-yuh-WAHS-cuh) looks like any bushy tree sprouting in the jungle. But to indigenous peoples in South America, it is a sacred plant whose name translates to "vine of the soul." They likened the patent in question to patenting the Christian cross.
The 13-year-old patent has become an issue of such magnitude that it has stirred physical threats, led to the cancellation of U.S. aid to South American tribes and all but shut down "bioprospecting" for valuable plants in Peru, Ecuador and the rest of the Amazon basin.
The fallout has been felt in St. Louis. The Missouri Botanical Garden, Monsanto Co. and Washington University all have found it more difficult to arrange bioprospecting ventures to South America in recent years to collect plants for new drugs and for traits that can be genetically engineered into crops. Many of the world's best- selling pharmaceuticals and most of its cancer drugs are from the tropics.
Jim Miller, who directs the Missouri Botanical Garden's global bioprospecting, said that many people in South America had wrongly associated the ayahuasca controversy with legitimate plant collecting. "It's sure got people fired up," he said. Miller, too, questioned whether the patent is valid.
The events started unfolding in the mid-1980s when Loren Miller, then a graduate student in pharmacology, brought home a variety of the plant from Ecuador. Miller founded the International Plant Medicine Corp. in California and applied for a U.S. patent, which was awarded in 1986. He had no plans to sell it as a hallucinogenic drug; he says he believed that the plant might contain properties that would be effective in psychotherapy and possibly in treating cancer.
Not until 1994 did the tribes learn of the patent. They decided it meant that Miller would control what had been part of their culture for centuries. Word even went out that shamans wanting to use ayahuasca would need his permission, which was untrue.
By 1996, feelings ran so hot that the council of tribes declared Miller "an enemy of indigenous peoples." A statement by the group warned that if Miller or his associates returned to the region, tribes "will not be responsible for the consequences to their physical safety."
The matter would not die down and last year, because of the threat, the U.S. government's Inter-American Foundation cut off aid to the tribal council after giving it more than $500,000 in recent years.
Miller asserted Tuesday that he has been a victim of misdirected anger. He said that he had not stolen the plant; it had been given to him from the garden of a tribe that he wouldn't identify. He also said that tests had found no valuable properties in the plant and that he has no plan to use the patent.
"If they say the patent is no good, I don't care. This is so ridiculous...I've never sold anything," he said.
Nonetheless, the tribal leaders say they have been violated. And they worry, they said, that the plant could be misused and cause harm. They likened it to coca, another South American cultural staple and the plant from which cocaine is derived.
David Downes, a lawyer in Washington representing the group, contended that Miller's patent is flawed and therefore should be revoked. The patent was awarded after Miller reported finding a new variety with flowers differently colored. William Anderson, a University of Michigan botanist supporting the challenge, said he had concluded that no new variety had been discovered.
Downes noted that several patents issued in the United States have infuriated people around the world. For instance, patents were awarded to companies on turmeric, a spice, and for basmati rice, both staples in India.
"When people claim as private property something that is sacred knowledge of thousands of people, we fear that patents have gone too far into the public domain," Downes said.
