It is vital that we patent our herbal wealth fast It is vital that we patent our herbal wealth fast

Hope this letter finds you in good cheer. Do you remember how when I was young you used to apply haldi (turmeric) paste on my wounds and it used to heal quickly?

Well, two American researchers of Indian origin, Suman K. Das and Hari Har P. Cohly of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, put a claim to the US Patent and Trademark Office, maintaining that they had discovered haldi's healing properties. And, surprise, they were granted a patent in March 1995 for something you had known for years and our ayurveds for centuries.

It meant they had exclusive rights over any such haldi drug and were in a position to make millions of dollars. Now don't get upset. Or tell me to run and quickly get a patent for your churans that you send me for my stomachaches! Because there is good news.

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (it has all these big government laboratories under it and is better known by its acronym CSIR) last year applied to the US Patent Office for a reexamination. This was after Indian scientists shouted from rooftops about how we are losing our traditional knowledge to marauding foreign companies who have started poaching on our ancient healing techniques.

Last week, the US Patent Office acknowledged it had made a mistake and cancelled the patent on turmeric. This is a major victory because seldom does it fully revoke a patent it has granted. I met R.A. Mashelkar, CSIR's director-general, immediately after the verdict and he couldn't stop smiling triumphantly throughout the interview. He told me that the victory will send a strong warning to all those bio-pirates of our herbal wealth and that India is ready to take them on.

This is a positive development because our country has always been a late riser to the challenge posed by such sharks. Remember the neem leaves that you used to keep away insects from our kitchen garden? Every kisan in India knew that it was a good pesticide among other things. Yet, a few years ago, a US company applied for a patent for neem as a pesticide and was granted it.

We could do nothing about it because that company claimed it had developed an agent that would make the active pesticide agent in neem to last for more than the normal two weeks. Although our scientists had been tinkering around with research on neem for years, they had not applied for this specific process and the battle was lost.

R.A. Mashelkar says we can take on bio-pirates now. R.A. Mashelkar says we can take on bio-pirates now.

So we need to learn our lessons quickly. Rather than beating of chests, what is needed is a combination of scientific mumbo-jumbo and legal savvy to win the patents game as we did in the case of turmeric. We also need to understand the criteria for giving patents and how to address them.

The US Patent Office grants a patent on the basis of a process or product being novel, non-obvious and having industrial applications. India hired a US legal firm to challenge the turmeric patent on the novelty criterion. For that, it had to produce, what is known as, "prior-art" or written publications in the public domain before the date of the claimed invention.

Mashelkar tells me that CSIR put a team of scientists together to scan Indian publications that established the country's knowledge base on turmeric. They came up with 32 extracts from various journals, some dating to the time when you were a teenager, to bolster their case.

The exercise also proved just how insufficient our documentation was on this subject. What we need to do is get our scientific data put into an electronic library database so that even I can access them on my home computer when I want to. It will also help us battle dubious patents by proving that we had all this knowledge before.

The other thing we have to do on priority is revamp our patent offices which are notorious for their inefficiency. It takes an average six years to decide on a patent by which time, in many cases, it may be too late for the scientist to cash in on his invention. In the US, it takes two years at the most. Our patenting set-up needs to be brought to international standards so that the patents it grants carry weight elsewhere in the world.

Also, our scientists need to wake up and focus their efforts on building scientific data on many of these herbal cures. Happily, the CSIR has put together a team that has identified 400 such herbs. They are now working towards having them patented.

If that happens, then it will be difficult for foreign companies to steal away your clove remedy for tooth-aches and claim that they had developed it. In any case, do let me know the ingredients. Maybe its still time for me to change my profession and earn plenty of money.

Yours affectionately,

Raj Chengappa

