How to fight a patent pirate

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back in the 1990s, Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar was in his office in New Delhi when he came across a puzzling story in the newspaper. Some university scientists in the U.S. had apparently filed a patent for using turmeric to help heal wounds. Mashelkar was shocked, because he knew that using turmeric that way was a well known remedy in traditional Indian medicine. And he knew that patents are for brand new inventions. So, he decided to do something about it – to go to battle against the turmeric patent.

But as he would soon discover, turmeric wasn't the only piece of traditional or indigenous knowledge that had been claimed in Western patent offices. The practice even had its own menacing nickname - biopiracy. And what started out as a plan to rescue one Indian remedy from the clutches of the U.S. patent office, eventually turned into a much bigger mission – to build a new kind of digital fortress, strong enough to keep even the most rapacious of bio-pirates at bay.

This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from James Sneed and Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Our engineers were Josh Newell and James Willetts. Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.3	At 81 years old, Dr. Ragunat Michelker has racked up dozens of illustrious titles and
0:12.2	honorary degrees over his long career as a scientist in India.
0:17.0	But the important one for the purposes of this story is more of a known digger.
0:22.0	Do you have any nicknames or honorific titles that are related to this story?
0:26.6	Oh yeah, I have. I have. Actually, I am referred to as a Haldigati warrior.
0:32.6	People call you the warrior of Haldigati?
0:35.3	Huh, warrior of Haldigati. Yeah, that's right.
0:38.3	This name Michelker explains is kind of an Indian pun.
0:42.2	Haldigati is the name of a famous battle from Indian history.
0:46.3	And Haldigati is the Hindi word or the spice we know in English as turmeric.
0:52.5	So the nickname basically translates to warrior of the turmeric battle.
0:58.1	And how did you come to be known as the warrior of Haldigati?
1:01.9	Yes, it is a very interesting galaxy. The way it happened, there is a story.
1:08.2	It's a story that begins back in 1995.
1:11.4	Michelker has a high level job in the Indian government.
1:14.3	He's overseeing dozens of the country's scientific and industrial labs.
1:18.5	Trying to develop new research and technology that will benefit the Indian economy.
1:23.5	So one morning, Michelker gets into his office in New Delhi, flips open a newspaper,
1:28.4	and he stumbles across a kind of puzzling new story.
1:31.6	And the headline was that the wound healing properties of turmeric have been patented in the US.
1:40.1	The wound healing properties of turmeric have been patented in the US.
	...

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