Greater fairness needed in opening up Indigenous medical knowledge

Early-2003: Cerylid Pty Ltd starts tests on compounds extracted from the bark of a small shrub which grows in the tropical rainforest of Sarawak. With testing underway at the US National Cancer Institute, the company hopes to discover new cures that could benefit millions of people worldwide.

Mid-2003: Queensland premier Peter Beattie announces his government is to seek royalty payments for any pharmaceuticals developed from living materials collected by bioprospectors on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Lured by the promise of fantastic profits and benefit to humanity, bioprospectors are now searching nature worldwide for new cures. But just as nature's medicine chest is being prised open, controversy over the ownership of natural materials of medical interest and over compensation to Indigenous people who might have made use of nature's medicines threatens to slam it shut. The Queensland premier's statement highlights the fact that the issue has entered the mainstream.

Bioprospcting or biopiracy?

The potential for developing pharmaceuticals and industrial materials from samples found in nature in not new. Penicillin, one of the world's most widely used drugs, was based on material found in an African fungus. Tea tree oil, from Australia's Malaleuca alternifolia, is marketed worldwide for its antiseptic properties. So too is Eucalyptus oil.

Despite bioprospecting's evident benefit to human kind, critics - including an increasingly powerful Indigenous lobby - label it biopiracy. They say that Indigenous people do not receive sufficient recompense for sharing their traditional pharmaceutical knowledge with the drug companies. They allege that companies stand to reap millions, even billions of dollars from the small number of plant and animal extracts that prove suitable for the production of new pharmaceuticals.

The sensitivity of the issue is exemplified by John Lennis, Aboriginal education officer with Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. John, who is of mixed Aboriginal/ European ancestry, refuses to disclose the traditional medical uses of native plants. He says that Indigenous Australians have received little benefit from sharing their knowledge. John's attitude, however, may be too little too late as much has already been published on the Aboriginal use of plants for medical purposes. Despite this, there must be so much more to learn but that depends on Aboriginal willingness to share their knowledge.

In part, Aboriginal reluctance to share traditional knowledge is a reaction to the wider injustices they have been subject to and to their desire to retain cultural identity. Critics, however, say moves to lock up useful knowledge denies it to those who are suffering.

Moral arguments

Premier Beattie's June statement promises to reap a financial return to the state for natural material developed into pharmaceutical products. This is good as far as it goes, however there is also sound moral, social justice and business arguments for financial returns directly to Indigenous people who share traditional knowledge.

The most commonly favoured form of recompense is the payment by drug companies of royalties on pharmaceuticals developed from natural extracts found with the help of traditional knowledge. It could be argued that there should also be an upfront payment to traditional landholders for bioprospecting rights. Research organisations and pharmaceutical corporations might look upon payments to traditional knowledge holders as a business arrangement in much the same way that business pays for any raw material.

There is also an equally valid moral argument that says that by refusing to share, custodians of Indigenous knowledge deny the healing power of natural substances to the wider public and, in doing so, perpetuate suffering.

The solution to this issue will have to be legislative. Preferably, it would be federal legislation covering bioprospecting and the payment of royalties. The Queensland government's proposal is an appropriate first step.

Indigenous privatisation

Choosing not to share their knowledge leaves Indigenous communities open to criticism that their secrecy is, in effect, a form of "privatization" of knowledge as ethnic or cultural property. People who support this kind of privatisation but oppose privatisation in other areas of the economy leave themselves open to accusations of double standards.

Also in need of consideration is the question of whether traditional rights apply to plants and materials for which there is no record of use by Indigenous cultures but that occur in areas traditionally inhabited by them. Does the geographic range of species infer ownership although no use might have been made of the species?

An affirmative answer has the potential to open a can or worms worldwide and raises the question of just what is a native plant and for how long does a species have to have grown in an area before becoming 'native'. Are tamarind trees introduced hundreds of years ago into northern Australia by fishermen from Macassar, that have since gone wild ("naturalized") now native species? And could not the descendents of those fishermen claim them as traditional property if the geographical distribution argument for traditional rights is accepted? Then there are offshore resources retrieved from traditional fishing grounds but not used by Indigenous fishermen.

Secret knowledge at issue

At issue is how secret traditional "secret" knowledge should remain when people outside the culture stand to benefit from it. It can be argued that the greater good has precedence over the sectional or ethnic interests of a particular culture, that the practice of keeping secret the traditional knowledge of medicines is morally indefensible. The complexity of the issue begs the question of whether there is some arrangement through which all can benefit without particular Indigenous cultures being weakened.

There is also an argument for reciprocity. If Indigenous cultures in Australia and elsewhere share traditional medical and plant knowledge with scientists and pharmaceutical companies, then should not those people have access to modern medicines? This is potentially a hot political topic, as was demonstrated when African organisations and their Western supporters successfully argued for cheap access to expensive anti-HIV/ AIDS drugs despite initial resistance from pharmaceutical companies. If resistance to sharing traditional medical and plant knowledge is morally indefensible then so is the reticence of wealthy pharmaceutical companies in sharing their developments.

Will science avoid the argument?

The argument over access to traditional knowledge emerged in the 1980s when the potential for new medicines from nature become popular knowledge. Before that, it was the preserve of scientists and anthropologists.

But just as the issue is becoming topical, the science of genetic engineering could bypass it. Science's ability to insert particular genes into the DNA strand implies that they may no longer need access to an entire organism to extract bioactive genetic material, just to the part of it containing the desired genetic material. This would make the policing of bioprospecting difficult were state or national legislation be developed to cover the activity.

Needed - a pharmaceutical reconciliation

The gut reaction of Indigenous lobbies to the proposal for sharing their traditional medical knowledge would at best be guarded and at worst hostile. This is understandable given the economic exploitation of Indigenous cultures in the past, but to oppose sharing denies wider humanity the benefit of new medicines. It risks the Balkanisation of knowledge according to ethnic affiliation in much the same way that corporations protect their knowledge through patents. This should be borne in mind by non-Indigenous advocates of Aboriginal rights who may see secrecy as support for the Aboriginal cause but who may miss the bigger picture.

It may be easier for Western lobby groups to pressure pharmaceutical corporations to reach equitable arrangements with Indigenous interests than to wait for something coherent to emerge from the corridors of government. But, in the end, it falls to government to negotiate a fair basis for sharing traditional medical plant knowledge. But government is often out of its depth when deliberating on new areas of science. Maybe Canberra could use the Queensland proposal as the basis for developing national legislation that would end the treatment of Indigenous people's knowledge as a free input into business and that would result in the availability of new medicines for all.