Dedicated Thread: Do seed companies control research? >>That table was in a conference room at Iowa State University. The university scientists were shoulder-to-shoulder with the industry representatives for the first time. “I think probably the biggest thing that came out of it is that we were sort of two communities talking past each other,” LaVigne said. “There were really a-ha moments on both sides. It evolved over the next six months and then the principles were adopted.” Those principles made explicit an industry commitment to allow independent scientists to do any sort of research they wanted with commercially available seeds, as long as they weren’t trying to pirate the technology, and as long as they don’t sell or release the seeds into the wild afterward. If you read these principles [PDF], it sounds like the problem’s solved. So I asked Shields: How’s that working out? “If you are at a major agricultural school that’s negotiated an agreement with the companies, it’s working fine,” he said. Any scientist working at those institutions with agreements is now free to experiment. The catch is that the companies require the universities to sign a further legal agreement, showing that they understand they can’t let researchers pirate the seeds or plant them after the experiment is over. “Each company has to decide how many universities to make those agreements with,” Shields said. “What justification they have and why they pick one over the other, that’s above my pay grade. It may be that they know there’s a scientist whose work they don’t like, so they don’t choose that university.” I went back to LaVigne and asked, why not just let all universities do this? He explained that it took a lot of time and lawyerly effort to draft agreements with every university, and some of the smaller companies had made the determination that they just didn’t have the lawyers on staff to contact them all. But why bring in the lawyers in the first place? Why not just lay out the guidelines and go after anyone who violates them? That was just the decision the companies made, LaVigne said. Want to guess where Monsanto stands in this? Monsanto has a blanket agreement allowing research at all universities in the United States. And actually, when Shields et al. made their complaint, Monsanto claimed it already had many of these agreements in place allowing independent research. “Was that true?” I asked Shields. “Could you have been doing research on Monsanto grain?” “Yes,” he said. “We just didn’t know it. I’m a scientist, I don’t speak legalese. Monsanto gets a lot of pain in the public press, but they are the company that interacts the best with public scientists — they have always been on the forefront of pushing public research forward.”
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 03:06:14 +0000
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