Today, however, pharmaceutical companies, historians, seed companies, and other interest are finding that indigenous knowledge is a rich source of information on medicine, crop rotation and agricultural practices, botany and husbandry, and are looking to it for cures to cancer and diabetes, methods of soil preservation, fermentation processes, pest control, and other solutions to modern problems. Innumerable patents, techniques, and inventions have been derived from knowledge unique to specific cultures and locations, without granting any benefits to the indigenous peoples that knowledge was gleaned from.
The United States has a particularly liberal policy on patents, granting patents on plants, gene sequences, even entire cell lines. U.S. Patent Law does not recognize technologies and methods in use in other countries as prior art. If knowledge is new for the U.S., it is considered novel, even if it is part of an ancient tradition of other cultures. Patents have been granted as new, herbs, plants, and spices whose healing or medicinal properties have been known to indigenous peoples for generations. Many countries do not award patents on living things, except crop strains. But under U.S. patent law almost anything that has been modified or manipulated by humans is eligible for consideration. After learning of their uses from traditional cultures U.S. companies not only routinely patent for allegedly novel uses of plants and animals, but also patent gene sequences, human cell lines, even entire, genetically modified organisms.
Many third and fourth world spokespersons, even scientists in the U.S. and Europe describe such patents as genetic imperialism, piracy, theft, and technological colonialism.
Anthropologists have regularly stolen information from and about a culture hoping to reveal their exotic ways and unique world view. Telling themselves that they are working for the good of the world and the indigenous group, they've ignored and rationalized the fact those groups have rarely benefited equally when they've shared their knowledge or heritage. Anthropologists have stolen artifacts, robbed graves, and tricked reluctant informants into giving them secret, even sacred information as if it was their unalienable right as scientists to be privy to such knowledge because they were scientists, and with the implied superiority of their own culture. Little if any compensation was ever given to the study group while the anthropologist reaped sometimes enormous academic and financial rewards. Indigenous activists today consider such theft of their ideas and cultural heritage as "academic imperialism," and denounce the outsiders assumed right to tell information about the secrets of a culture they are not part of, often against the wishes of that culture.
