Libido-enhancing root in global dispute

By Rick Vecchio

updated 1:02 p.m. ET Jan. 5, 2007

JUNIN, Peru - In a small storefront on a bleak, wind-swept Andean plateau, Timotea Cordova offers an oxygen-deprived visitor a traditional elixir to ward off the breathless effect of the high altitude.

Dropping a few shriveled tuber roots into a blender, the 80-year-old, Quechua Indian shopkeeper promises with a playful glance that the concoction will also provide a leg up later in the bedroom.

For hundreds of years, Quechua Indians have grown maca, the frost-resistant root that thrives in these frigid Andean highlands, to boost stamina and sex drive. The root, they believe, is nature's bounty and belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.

Maca growers and indigenous organizations were outraged when, in 2001, a New Jersey-based company, PureWorld Botanicals, received a U.S. patent for exclusive commercial distribution of an extract of maca's active libido-enhancing compounds that it branded as MacaPure.

Peruvian officials called the patent an "emblematic case" of biopiracy and are preparing to challenge it in U.S. courts.

The maca dispute is just the latest collision between indigenous people and commercial interests over so-called biological prospecting, the growing practice of scouring the globe for exotic plants, microbes and other living things ripe for commercial exploitation.

Bioprospecting has huge potential for good, say researchers who go to sea, climb mountains and trek to obscure corners of the world in search of exotic and undiscovered life.

A 2005 U.N. University report concluded that 62 percent of all cancer drugs were created from bioprospecting discoveries.

Karel Navarro / AP file A local farmer shows a maca plant in Junin, Peru. For hundreds of years, Quechua Indians have grown maca, the frost-resistant root that grows in these frigid Andean highlands, to boost stamina and sex drive. The root, they believe, is nature's bounty and belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.

The venom of a deadly sea snail found off the coast of the Philippines led Elan Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop the painkiller Prialt, which U.S. regulators approved in 2004. The key ingredient in the breast cancer drug Taxol owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. is taken from the bark of the yew tree, and Wyeth's kidney transplant drug Rapamune comes from Easter Island soil.

But bioprospecting is mostly unregulated and there are mounting calls to establish legal frameworks for such work.

The Convention on Biological Diversity produced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro entitled nations to a share of the profits from substances yielded by their flora and fauna. It was ratified by 188 countries — but not the United States, which argues that such a requirement stifles innovation and would undermine the patent system.

That hasn't stopped some of the world's poorest countries, which also hold the richest pockets of natural biodiversity, from fighting to apply the convention to international patent law.

India has had the most success, most recently persuading the European Patent Board of Appeals to invalidate a 1994 patent granted to U.S.-based W.R. Grace & Co. for an insecticide derived from neem seeds.

Peru and Brazil, both at the forefront of the biopiracy debate, have been less persuasive.

Brazil, which has some of the world's strictest regulations to prevent the removal of genetic materials from the Amazon, has been hard-pressed to demonstrate a single case of biopiracy before the World Trade Organization.

Attempts by Peruvian indigenous groups, meanwhile, ultimately failed to overturn U.S. patents based on ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant used for centuries in religious and healing ceremonies, and nuna, a nutritious Andean bean that pops when toasted.

Peru hopes the MacaPure dispute will become a pivotal case in attempts to require all patent applications to disclose the source of genetic materials.

Alejandro Argumedo, a Quechua Indian agronomist and activist, says the French company that bought PureWorld in 2005, Naturex, has no right to "privatize knowledge that belongs to an entire region."

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