According to Hope Shand, "...farmers and consumers of the developing world will end up paying royalties on proprietary biotechnologies that are based on their knowledge and resources." She also claims that modern plant molecular biology is literally building on the accumulated success achieved by the generations of farmers that first domesticated and improved cotton in Central and South America over the past 10,000 years. I find that Ms Shand's arguments are a case of political­ideological abuse of history, i.e. the deliberate attempt to replace history by myth and invention.

I can not grasp what "knowledge and resources" she is referring to, given the fact that biotechnology is built up on macromolecular physics and chemistry, genetics, and molecular biology, scientific disciplines virtually absent in the South. To equate the present day agrobiotechnology to the domestication of cotton is equivalent to equating Galileo and Newton with the astrologists, and Lavoisiere, Faraday and Dalton with the alchemists!

What is the connection between us, the present inhabitants of Central and South America with the people who domesticated cotton thousands of years ago? Does Ms Shand know whether the original inhabitants of the Americas at the time of the European conquest were the actual domesticators of cotton, or were they the descendants of earlier invaders that had destroyed the original 'domesticators' and stolen their agricultural technology? Besides, the populations of nowadays Argentina and Brazil (two countries which comprise 63 per cent of the total surface of South America, and harbour 65 per cent of its inhabitants) are essentially made up by recent immigrants. Yet, although totally unrelated to those who domesticated cotton, and regardless of our ethnic origin, we are also the victims of 500 years of exploitation and brutalization that led to our present disaster.

Concerning "their (our) resources," human talent is the only biological resource that I know which the South is being depleted of. Many of our brightest people are expelled towards the First World by retrograde societies mired in the preservation of the status quo. The South will certainly pay royalties for their discoveries, e.g. the monoclonal antibody technology invented by Cambridge's Nobel Laureate Cesar Milstein (from Argentina). And Milstein is but the tip of a gigantic iceberg of expatriate achievement, which could fill several issues of the Monitor. This exodus of human capital is the result of policies of cultural annihilation practised throughout the South first by the imperial powers, then by their native economic viceroys, and now by their corrupt ruling classes.

If Ms Shand equates resources to germplasm, we should ask why after 500 years of Latin American history, the region still cannot achieve anything meaningful with its germplasm. During the colonial period, science was banned from Latin America; in the post­colonial period, the local response to the exploits of Latin American scientists was indifference, and the social exploitation of their results was always done abroad. While nobody in the South cared about the Brazilian discovery of the angiotensin I converting enzyme inhibitor peptides present in snake venoms, Squibb did. The first synthetic angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor (the result of a corporate research effort led by an Argentine expatriate) meant billions of dollars of annual revenues on a single drug for the company. The discoverers of the steroid precursor in Mexican barbasco originated the multibillion contraceptive industry, were virtually chased out from Mexico, and went to the USA, where they founded a leading American pharmaceutical corporation, Syntex. I do not see here traces of imperialism in action, but the destructive effects of the ignorance that characterizes underdevelopment.

Ms Shand cares about germplasm, but fails to mention that germplasm soon will be not worth a penny. Strategic genes are identified in and isolated from model organisms and, suitably modified, used to construct the desired transgenics. Yet the South does not participate in the genome projects, and is marginalized from explicit technological research agendas aimed to the discovery of strategic genes. And what about human germplasm? The gene responsible for Huntington disease, which holds the key for the understanding of the biochemical and genetic bases of programmed cell death, memory, consciousness, mood and will, was isolated in the USA in 1993 using the DNA from an afflicted family in Venezuela. No Venezuelan biomedical scientists worked in the hunt of the Huntington's disease gene, neither in Venezuela or in the First World, and Huntington's disease was a non­existing problem for Venezuela and its scientific community.

The issue is not the construction of myths about the ancient cultures, but true development, i.e, the South's capability to understand, use and exploit the intellect to improve life. And this is what the North, both the blue meanies and the well­intentioned critics, succeeds in inhibiting and hampering. At times, the arguments of the critics who so passionately argue for the 'people of the South,' are based on disparaging stereotypes, and have a ring of a distinct antiscientific hue. 'They' (that is, us, the noble savages) are good to be saintly poor, toil the earth, and live in close contact with nature. I believe that the actively underdeveloping world has a lot to gain by being in very close contact with the scientific periodical Nature, not with nature!
Daniel J. Goldstein

Daniel L. Goldstein is Professor of Biology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.