WE agree with French Ambassador Gerard Chesnel and Ambassador Donald Dee, the president of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI), that knocking off popular brands is bad business.

Undersecretary Adrian Cristóbal Jr., the head of the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOP), is doing a creditable job enforcing Republic Act 8293, the Intellectual Property Code, but besides seizing and destroying fake merchandise no one has been sent to jail—yet.

Our concern goes beyond the sale of imitation products. The patent laws that are in the Code are inadequate and outdated. In the Philippines a 20-year patent can be given to any product of human ingenuity that’s new and useful. This definition falls short of recent developments in biotechnology and molecular biology.

In many other countries, particularly in the United States, patentable objects include genes and even whole organisms.

On October 14, 2005, Science reported that 4,382 of about 24,000 genes in a human body are owned by corporations, universities, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

For example, Harvard University has a patent on a gene that’s involved in the early development of the spinal cord. A US company, Incyte, owns the gene of a receptor of histamine, a chemical compound that’s released when a person has hay fever. About half of all genes known to be responsible for cancer have been patented. And so on.

We have lately become aware of biopiracy, the patenting by foreign entities of genes and molecules of plants and organisms that are unique or indigenous to the Philippines. To cite just one example, the molecule that produces the ilang-ilang scent has been patented by a European corporation.

The Bayh-Dole Act allows American universities to patent processes. Recombinant methods for synthesizing interferon, a drug that controls the growth of cancerous cells, are now commercial. The technology for manipulating DNA has been patented by two scientists. In short, some medical and scientific procedures may not be carried out without licensing agreements.

The concept of “human ingenuity” has been expanded to include possible research tools. An expressed sequence tag (EST) is a sequenced segment of DNA, located at the end of a gene. There’s no originality in locating an EST and yet patents have been given for them because they might serve as research tools.

The audacity of some claims for patents has alarmed many scientists. The idea that science proceeds from a common fund of knowledge is now dead. It is no longer inconceivable that property rights for an entire chromosome would be granted in the near future.

The IPOP has recently organized an Intellectual Property Academy. We suggest that this academy review urgently our patent laws so that we may protect not only our interests in the rapidly expanding fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology, areas that are critical for the economic future of the country, but the legitimate work of Filipino scientists and researchers.