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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I am reminded of a comment made about the Melissa virus [1]:

    While the Melissa license is a bit unclear, Melissa aggressively
    encourages free distribution of its source code.

While the license on genes is a bit unclear, they aggressively encourage free distribution of their source code. How are we going to prevent the Chinese from standing downwind of a farm plot and catching pollen for analysis? (I say "Chinese" only because that's what the story happens to be about... it applies to anyone, of course.) Or sequencing them through mundane means in the US and transmitting the gene code back to China?

Physically preventing people from "stealing" your genes is impossible in the long term. Only legal protection can work, and that is probably questionable in the long term too.

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00292.html

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Sequencing doesn't matter. It's getting the inbreds that matter. It's all in the article, but probably not so clear if you lack the background.

Getting a bag of GMO corn seed is not difficult. But reproducing said seed to the same level of quality is going to take you many years. It's a bit like trying to get a clone of yourself by having children with women: The kids will be a lot like you genetically, but it'll take you forever to make a clone.

So how do agricultural companies do this? By building special inbred varieties that have he same genotype as phenotype. All the offspring of crossing any specific pair of inbreds will be identical, and those are the offspring that you can buy at the store. The inbreds, who are also worse performing in the field, not so much: They are seen as trade secrets, and the companies just use them for research and manufacturing.

So it's not really about hiding the genetics of something you sell, or even hiding the genetics of something you use to create what you sell(which would still have some value, but still), but protecting the seeds of specific plants that are necessary to the manufacturing process.

If you give some corn breeders an entire bag of hybrid corn, and tell them to produce 1000 bags just like it, they'll ask you to come back in a decade or two. If you give them a bag of each of the inbreds that were use to make it,they will have the 1000 bags in a season. That's what agricultural companies try to protect.

You make these inbred parent seeds sound like private keys in encryption. You jealously guard them, you combine them to create offspring (public keys) which you freely distribute without worry, and lots of people are trying some arcane process to deduce your exact secret.

I think you mean public keys in the second sentence, but if so, that sounds like a very apt analogy.

Yes I did, and thank you.

Musing:

Hmm, so let's play with Diffie-Hellplant. So you have two inbred genomes as two secrets, persisted as individual organisms. Alice and Bob negotiate on a public inbred genome that they pull from some kind of seed store (being careful to never re-use one they've used before!). Alice and Bob both create their own crossbreeds deterministically, from the secret organism and the public one. It's hard to get the private genomes from the two crosses, so they can send the seeds in the mail to each other.

After that, I'm not sure you can get two shared secret clones from the crossbreeds and the opposite private inbreeds. (ETA: Pretty positive you can't, though if anyone has any ideas along these lines, I'm eager to hear!)

Sounds like the start of some cypher-biopunk novel, though.

Until this moment, I had not realized I would find such a book interesting.

If you're interested in sci-fi where biotech trumps cybertech, The Windup Girl is a great read.

Relevant to the article, too. It's set in a post-carbon dystopian Bangkok, where giant agribusiness monopolies dominate the world through control of the food supply, including offensive bioengineering to create mutant plagues that destroy native crops and introduce dependency. The main character is an agent of one of these agricorps, whose mission is espionage against Thailand's central seedbank.

Also "Calorie Man". Seemingly available here: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/WindupStories.pdf

"Calorie Man" reminded me a lot of "New Rose Hotel" by Gibson. Funny how the same story filters through different lenses as the years tick past.

But in this case, deducing the exact secret is trivially easy; everyone knows how to do it.

Yes, which is why we're discussing Chinese people digging corn seeds out of American farms.

> It's [...] probably not so clear if you lack the background.

> So how do agricultural companies do this? By building special inbred varieties that have [t]he same genotype as phenotype.

Are you sure you have "the background"? What do you mean by this? Genotypes and phenotypes can't be said to be "the same" in any dimension; they cover completely different ideas. Possible genotypes are things like "A allele" or "G allele", where phenotypes are things like "tall" or "slimy".

If you mean that the company strains are all homozygous at certain locations of interest, and the seed they sell is heterozygous, that just means that you'll lose a certain amount of seed to quality issues when you breed your seeds directly. It also means you can trivially recreate the company strains by lifting chromosomes out of non-gamete cells. (Granted, I have no idea where the technology is for this -- it's cloning in the conventional "I have a biology lab" sense.)

If you mean that the company strains actually have just the one chromosome N times over for each chromosome, that's hard to believe. An animal would almost definitely immediately die with genetic makeup like that. But, again, genetic engineering could still do this. Also, there's no way the genetic information of these company strains could be considered "trade secrets", since it's all freely released to the public in the hybrid strains.

> can trivially recreate the company strains by lifting chromosomes out of non-gamete cells.

That is an interesting idea. Corn has 10 pairs of chromosomes. I wonder if you can tell for each pair, which one came from which parent? But then again, it shouldn't matter. As long as a set of 10, and its complement, both produce viable individuals, their offspring should be identical to the desired hybrid.

Now we just must not tell this to the Chinese...

> Corn has 10 pairs of chromosomes. I wonder if you can tell for each pair, which one came from which parent?

For humans the chromosomes are marked in this way. I don't know about corn.

> For humans the chromosomes are marked in this way.

I'd like to read about this. Can you give a link (or just relevant words for googling), please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation

That's about as much as I know. Genomic imprinting is specifically to do with DNA that behaves differently depending on whether it's paternal or maternal. The most famous example of this "in real life" is Prader-Willi syndrome (mentioned in the imprinting article), in which the same genetic defect causes one of two radically different pathologies, depending on whether it came from the mother or father.

I think it's worth noting here that plant genetics is vastly more complex in basically every way than animal genetics.

So, why do the companies aggressively prevent seed keeping and sowing? Why do farmers have to buy seed each year?

If the harvested seed isn't the same as the sold seed what's the problem for the seed company?

(You can probably tell that my information comes from mostly anti GMO sources. But I'm not particularly anti GMO)

(This comment is going to get me so much hate, but match to kindling...)

Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta et al. are easy boogeymen. So are pharmaceutical companies.

I mean, they're just like the *AA, trying to create artificial scarcity through draconian IP laws, no?

No.

You may argue about compensation, and whether they're using unfair market tactics or taking an excessive share of the profits created by their products. But when you boil it down, these companies are burning incredible amounts of money (and talent) to fuel R&D engines that are literally keeping humans alive.

Look at Monsanto's research pipeline:

http://www.monsanto.com/products/pages/research-development-...

http://www.monsanto.com/investors/documents/2015/2015.01.07_...

Those profits aren't just being pissed into the wind. These are extremely competitive industries, doing cutting edge science, with the goal of feeding and/or healing humans. How downright evil of them.

I'm probably just as suspicious about GMOs as the next guy, but I've yet to hear any of the anti-GMO / anti-Big-Ag crowd propose a feasible solution for how we're going to keep pace with a ballooning world population. Farm to table or heritage variants don't feed the world. And it's just not cheap to (a) make something useful & (b) make sure it doesn't kill anyone.

If you think Big Ag is a problem, try imagining what a world with steadily declining food security looks like in terms of stability.

End result? Yes, protecting the golden goose so that it can keep laying eggs merits some extraordinary protections. Although, like everything else, I'm perfectly willing to debate on whether those are not-enough, just-right, or too-far. But I don't see how "none" gives us a very nice future.

these companies are burning incredible amounts of money (and talent) to fuel R&D engines that are literally keeping humans alive.

And, according to another FPP today[1], they're bilking us for a lot of these "wonder" drugs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080680

You're confusing clinical trials with FDA approved drugs. The FDA already has regulations in place to prevent the kind of abuse of statistics seen in that thread.

> These are extremely competitive industries, doing cutting edge science, with the goal of feeding and/or healing humans. How downright evil of them.

There's this idea that certain classes of activity are "too important" for profit-motive to be allowed. Education, healthcare, science, and agriculture usually fall in the line of fire. These people cheer on the companies that make their money in advertising or solving first world problems and demonize those that work on the capital-intensive problems in healthcare, science, or agriculture. Then they loudly complain about how the best of the best are going into the wrong lines of work. It's bonkers.

Moral tale: my brother was at the top of his class at an Ivy-league school and got his degree in physics. He did lab research on nanotechnology since high school. He seriously considered getting his PhD in physics. I counseled him to go to Wall Street instead, which he did. Now he makes a bunch of money and couldn't be happier.

What's my point? Getting a PhD in a hard science should be a license to print money like going into advertising or finance. Until that's true, you're not going to get the allocation of social resources you want. And government research isn't a solution to that. You'll never make a bunch of money working for the government. And if e.g. the government lets people keep the patents on research that's initially publicly-funded, so they can make a bunch of money on the endeavor, then the aforementioned people will demonize that as evil.

It's not that they are "too important" for profit, it's that the supply and demand laws are such that a free market is very hard to establish.

Taking healthcare for example, the incentives of the buyers (patients) and sellers (doctors) are inherently conflicting, as the former seek health, while the latter benefit when the former are sick. Furthermore, the patients very often urgently need help and don't have the time (nor the knowledge) to "shop around".

Or education. The "value" of a college is the increase in lifetime income vs. a high-school education, but given the slow feedback cycle (30 years or so of working) the market equilibrium is trending towards the price of college being the discounted value of all discretionary income of the graduates. This is aided by the US government that guarantees the loans and prevents them being discharged in bankruptcy.

A similar field is also infrastructure.

None of these fields must inherently be constrained by the government, but they need to be regulated in such a way that a free competition is encouraged.

> Taking healthcare for example, the incentives of the buyers (patients) and sellers (doctors) are inherently conflicting, as the former seek health, while the latter benefit when the former are sick.

That's trivially true of almost every market. People want food but restaurants benefit when the former are hungry!

That's true. Which is why restaurants in tourist spots should be less trusted. But most other restaurants have enough returning customers, and the customers have enough knowledge about the product they're buying, that the feedback loop (good product -> more profit) is much more direct.

That ignores the issue - being hungry is a basic need and it's ok that we keep getting hungry and meeting that need through restaurants.

People getting sick is not a basic need unless you are a healthcare company. That's why the incentives are conflicting.

Getting hungry happens naturally, so does getting sick. Restaurants and healthcare companies are needed to address each need. The incentives are the same.

Absolutely false.

Getting hungry again happens naturally regardless of the choice of food offered by a restaurant.

Whether you remain sick, are cured, or get sick again depends significantly on the choice of treatment offered. Healthcare companies have an incentive to choose treatments that don't cure you.

I'm not afraid of a profit motive, I'm afraid of moral hazard à la subprime mortgage backed securities.

I call b.s on: "and couldn't be happier."

Individual humans may have other things that motivate.

We don't need protection of these to help the world food security, the research could be publicly funded (and a lot of it is already) and publicly distributed. Of course then nobody makes a profit off owning the seed but that's not really necessary. It could just benefit everyone.

> the research could be publicly funded (and a lot of it is already)

I can say with absolute certainty that this is not the case. Funding is available for basic science only; the very difficult work of bringing genetics to market is simply not funded. Funding for research into e.g. drought resistance is limited to understanding genetic pathways. The closest you get to useful traits is QTL analysis. Make no mistake, this is very useful, foundational research. It enables a variety of approaches to creating new crops. It does not, however, create them.

Public funds should be used in this way. We should bring back seed banks, co-ops, and fund grants that actually aim to bring marketable traits to useful inbreds. I'd love to be able to point to GM intra-poaceae drought-tolerant corn and say, "this is what transgenics are capable of!" That's not the reality, though.

This is also not true. There is public funding going into creating new biotech varieties and publicly distributing them. Last year, for example, Arkansas released its first public roundup ready soybean (http://arkansasagnews.uark.edu/8273.htm). Sadly though these researchers had to wait for the patent to expire.

If they had to wait for the patent to expire, how is this a "new" variety?

The variety is "new" as it comes from the insertion of the rr1 gene into the University of Arkansas public breeding line as opposed to the lines used by Stine, etc. in the private sector.

But presumably the significant gene of interest was the "roundup" gene (for lack of a better term) that provided the glyphosate resistance, no? Wouldn't that be the gene that is covered by the patent and the one that really matters? Is the rr1 gene related somehow?

We don't have to imagine it. In the 1940s, Germany launched a war to take control of vast amounts of agricultural land and starve or explicitly mass-murder its inhabitants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

John Green has a good video on this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-2q-QMUIgY

Well, you also don't feed people hamburgers, steak, and bacon for every meal either if your goal is to "feed the world" and "keep humans alive." That doesn't stop people from doubling down on meat at every meal.

> propose a feasible solution for how we're going to keep pace with a ballooning world population.

Only half joking: By not feeding the ballooning of the world's population. Population growth was sustainable for most of history, then we eliminated scarcity and, well, we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance.

> we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance.

Untrue. Most of the parts of the world with the most resource abundance have very low or negative natural growth rates, with the overall growth in those areas driven by immigration from places with less abundance rather than natural increase, and we have very good information that strong social support networks promote reduced rates of natural population growth. We know quite well how to control growth in the context of resource abundance.

At least, population growth. Our waistlines may be another matter...

You make a good point. What prompted my comment was remembering when we were hitting the 3B mark and there were dire predictions, some efforts to curb population growth worked, a few too well (Japan, Europe). But thanks to the green revolution, and that not everyone made those same efforts, we are now more than double that with no sign of slowing down. In any case, point taken.

What if they lobby against better, safer solutions developed in the future because it affects their bottom line?

The article states the apparent agenda at its end:

"The intent of the U.S. government to use food as an ever-more powerful point of leverage to wield over large, increasingly hungry nations like China. The prosecution of Mo Hailong and his circle stands as a warning to the Chinese government, issued through its proxy companies. The ears in the field, the seeds in the ground, even the pollen on the wind, are American-owned and American-protected. They are available to the world as food only if you agree to our conditions and are willing to pay our price."

And the US, as the only superpower (1) has many ways of making other nations to comply.

One nice example, related to the GM food and the EU opposition of it, can be extrapolated from the links:

June 2003:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jun/24/gm.food

"Mr Bush's comments came barely a month after his administration took Europe's ban on GM crops to the World Trade Organisation, saying the moratorium was a barrier to trade."

Just a little later:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/02/gm.food2

"The European parliament today lifted the ban on genetically modified foods, instead choosing to impose a strict labelling regime that could stave off a trade war with the US."

------

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_superpowers

Not to mention all that is going on with TTIP now; essentially, trade officials are saying that working through GE crop related non-tariff barriers to trade is what the whole deal hinges on (ie. consumers are against it in EU and ag biz lobby is trying to ram it down their throats from over here. I would mention, as its a common misconception, that it's legal to sell GE crops in the EU, they just did so terribly that they've been pulled from shelves- Consumers exercised a preference and the market dictates). For some more info (pdf from Center For Food Safety):

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/trade_matters_10_14...

Here is the link to the page linking to the pdf

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/reports/3152/trade-matter...

That is a fascinating, high-quality wikipedia page. I didn't know that sort of article existed, but it is a credit to the editors.

This has been done for years domestically Farmers have been driven to bankruptcy by Monsanto, Pioneer etc for simply having fields where cross-contamination occurred. Now all that is happening is this idea is being enforced internationally...too bad. I had hoped people outside the US would force us to realize this error.

This hasn't happened, or you need a citation please.

I've searched a little, found "Myths Of Genetically Modified Seeds, Busted," obviously something that can be considered a pro-GMO article for the way how the specific "myth" is formulated, but it's good enough to find out what's being claimed:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...

In short, if the farmer would select only the plants that survive the herbicide (effectively only those that over cross-pollination get "Monsanto" genes), they could sue him, and they did sue Schmeiser (and the farmer would probably lose as in the given example "The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto's patent" and the farmer lost).

But if the farmer has just the "trace amounts of GMOs" in his crops they wouldn't (and they "will pay to remove any of its GMOs from fields where they don't belong."(!))

The myth as stated in the article is "Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen." Note "traces". Only that is a myth.

But that they sue when somebody sows the seeds with the genes from their seed that he hasn't bought from them, even if he obtained them by cross-pollination, it happened, they sued, and they won the case.

So it takes an active step by the farmer who is sowing seeds he/she has reason to know are protected.

The "active" step is simply keeping the seeds from the plants you sowed on your land with your own seeds that survived the herbicides. Schmeiser claims that he was doing breeding of his own seeds for 50 years. Why shouldn't he?

Ok, yes they will sue when a farmer willingly and deliberately uses cross pollinate seeds. I see nothing controversial there though.

It is controversial as the farmer was actually doing breeding himself 50 years using his own seeds. His actions were the actions of the breeder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser#Monsanto_v._Sc...

"In 1997, Percy Schmeiser found Monsanto's genetically modified “Roundup Ready Canola” plants growing near his farm. He testified that he sprayed his nearby field and found that much of the crop survived, meaning it was also Roundup Ready.[2] He testified that he then harvested that crop, saved it separately from his other harvest, and intentionally planted it in 1998.[2] Monsanto approached him to pay a license fee for using Monsanto's patented technology without a license. Schmeiser refused, claiming that the actual seed was his because it was grown on his land, and so Monsanto sued Schmeiser for patent infringement on August 6, 1998.[2]"

Nobody disputes that it was a case of cross-pollination. He was sued for keeping the results of that cross-pollination. Why shouldn't he if he didn't use the seeds from Monsanto but his own?

Because the seeds weren't his own anymore. What, you think he believes he bred a roundup ready crop? That's why he lost the case, he definitely knew what he was doing.

How come the seeds aren't his own? The complete genetic structure of his seeds is certainly different to the Monsanto ones. It's just that the one allele got transferred via cross-pollination and remained in his own seeds he preserved, giving the seeds one specific property which is the same as in the Monsanto seeds.

Breeding is selecting your own seeds based on their properties, and Schmeiser was a breeder.

Unless I'm missing something from your citation, he wasn't sued. He was the suer, and he won. I don't see what's controversial about that.

Edit: I see that the other suit[1] was not cited. In the Monsanto v. Schmeizer suit, he was accidentally planting Monsanto seeds that he had harvested, and did not mount a sufficient defense against it.

"Schmeiser supporters argued that his account still leaves open the possibility that the harvesting and replanting of Roundup Ready canola from the sprayed region was accidental and resulted from a miscommunication between Schmeiser and his farmhand, or from a failure of Schmeiser to have the presence of mind to instruct his farmhand to avoid taking canola seed for replanting from the sprayed region."

He knowingly used Monsanto seeds in his crops, but thought that using the seeds would not be theft because he didn't apply RoundUp to them. That's like suggesting that if I steal a Tesla roadster, but convert it to a gasoline engine, then I haven't stolen it.

Again though, I don't see this as terribly controversial, unless I'm missing something.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...

Stealing a physical thing (Tesla Roadster) is not at all like infringing a patent or violating a contract. Your arguments would work a lot better if you didn't say things like that.

I respect intellectual property, so the analogy works for me, but fine, it's like pirating an English film that's been dubbed into a language other than the one it was filmed in, and claiming that no piracy has occurred.

Edit: That first sentence came out unintentionally snarky, but I can't think of a better way to put it, so please understand that no snark was intended.

That's also a terrible analogy.

And are you saying that I don't respect intellectual property, if I disagree with the previous flawed analogy? Many people who respect intellectual property don't agree with it: just look at the reactions of experts to the various "Piracy is theft" PR campaigns.

Apologies. I knew it was going to come off snarky, but was in the middle of something then, and didn't have the cycles to fix it.

It was not my intent to imply that you did not respect IP, just that I do, and to me, the theft of an album is on equal moral footing with the theft of a car (though, commensurately less so, given the value). As, to me, they are the same, the analogy worked to me.

I don't know what's terrible about the second analogy, but either way, the guy knowingly used seeds that weren't his, claiming at one point that its planting was a miscommunication, and that it should have been allowed due to lack application of RoundUp at another.

The case was not concerned with any accidental plantings, but focused only on those plants that he intentionally harvested and planted, claiming imaginary "farmer's rights" of ownership of anything that happens to be upon his physical property.

I'll refrain from coming up with another flawed analogy here, but it doesn't seem controversial to me that he lost because he did not present a legally valid defense to the Canadian court system.

> he guy knowingly used seeds that weren't his

If they had been cross-pollinated (and nobody proved otherwise) the seeds had been his all the time. If you'd do DNA sequencing of such seeds you'd see a different DNA from the Monsanto seeds. But Monsanto claimed that as soon as the seeds produce plant resistant to their herbicide he has no right to use his own seeds.

The software analogy were, the computer virus infests your document files because you surf the same sites as your neighbors who pay "Monsanto protection." The infected files contained only the text you wrote, after running the Monsanto scanner only the infected files remain on your disk, all others are deleted. You can't preserve, copy or edit the infected files anymore because Monsanto, which produced the virus, has a copyright on avoiding Monsanto virus scanner, so as soon as the files aren't deleted by the Monsanto scanner you can't keep your own files.

The advantageous property in the seeds he developed, originated from the cross-pollination. He just purified the Monsanto-originated genes into a usable strain.

If a software analogy is what you want, it's like he used some third party library which requires a license to make new software, but didn't pay for the license. Sure, the code is new and unique and his, but it contains the code that is patented.

Doing it by mistake is one thing. But he clearly did it on purpose and was trying to win in court to get away with it.

Citation: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/cfsmonsantovsfarmer...

In May 2003, the Center for Food Safety embarked on a project to determine the extent to which American farmers have been impacted by litigation arising from the use of patented genetically engineered crops. After extensive research and numerous interviews with farmers and lawyers, CFS found that Monsanto, the world’s leading agricultural biotechnology company, has used heavy-handed investigations and ruthless prosecutions that have fundamentally changed the way many American farmers farm. The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed.

The largest recorded judgment made thus far in favor of Monsanto as a result of a farmer lawsuit is $3,052,800.00. Total recorded judgments granted to Monsanto for lawsuits amount to $15,253,602.82. Farmers have paid a mean of $412,259.54 for cases with recorded judgments.

No farmer is safe from the long reach of Monsanto. Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else’s genetically engineered crop; when genetically engineered seed from a previous year’s crop has sprouted, or “volunteered,” in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year; and when they never signed Monsanto’s technology agreement but still planted the patented crop seed. In all of these cases, because of the way patent law has been applied, farmers are technically liable. It does not appear to matter if the use was unwitting or a contract was never signed

No, they haven't.

> Physically preventing people from "stealing" your genes is impossible in the long term.

You can't stop people from doing anything, it's always about slowing them down and making it hard right?

5 minutes on the lock on your door might mean a non broken in house.

A day or two on the net for software or media might equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A month or two for genes might equal billions.

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