Russel Lawrence Barsch, “Who Steals Indigenous Knowledge?” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law (April 2001), 153-161.

• 153 – “It is widely agreed that mainstream intellectual property tools such as patent, copyright, trademark, geographical names, and trade secrets may be tactically useful but are inadequate to capture all of the cultural and economic significance of local ecological, agricultural, or medical knowledge to indigenous communities, or to ensure the perpetuation of local knowledge systems as living, creative, and scientific disciplines.”
• “Patent and copyright not only presume that the act of innovation is largely individual rather than social, but that innovators are motivated by financial gain, and that it is the role of the state, rather than innovators, to ensure that new knowledge is used responsibly.”
• “In my experience, custodians of local knowledge believe that knowledge is socially created, through interaction among humans and nonhumans; that individuals are obliged to put their knowledge to use unselfishly; and that teachers of knowledge possess an inalienable responsibility to ensure its proper use.”
• 153-4 – “My aim here is to show that the policy debate has proceeded largely in abstraction, with little regard to two key questions of fact: To what extent does indigenous knowledge actually get into the commercial patent system? Are the same kinds of entities responsible for the original research in indigenous communities and for patent-protected commercialization of the leads gained from community-level research?”

• 154 – “My study of patents and scientific publications shows that (1) very few patents are derived directly from indigenous medical or ecological knowledge; (2) most patents with indigenous origins were inspired by data already placed in the public domain through the publications of academic researchers; and (3) while corporate interest in field research on indigenous knowledge is waning, academic research in this field is growing , and more of it is being carried out by academics employed by institutions in developing countries.”

• 155-6 – “Three Big Pharma corporations and an emerging biotechnology company participated in ICBG projects, along with six U.S. universities. However, only one U.S. patent has resulted from the ICBG program thus far, although two hundred thousand field specimens were screened. In the view of its director, the ICBS program has demonstrated that indigenous peoples’ pharmacopoeia are largely effective as claimed; nonetheless, ethnomedically guided drug discovery simply cannot compete with the speed of laboratory drug discovery methods.”
  • CORROBORATED IN CORI HAYDEN’S WHEN NATURE GOES PUBLIC
• 156 – “. . . more than one hundred articles published during the period 1990-1994 identified specific traditional phytomedicines together with data on in vitro or clinical tests of their biological activity and efficacy. This suggests that academic activity poses a much greater immediate threat to indigenous knowledge systems than the patent system.”