Libido-enhancing root in global dispute

Naturex's marketing manager, Antoine Dauby, says the company acknowledges that maca's beneficial properties were long ago discovered by indigenous Peruvians. He says its patent lets them "grow, sell and use maca as they have for centuries."

"Our patent is for the extraction and isolation of maca's key ingredient — and nothing else," said Dauby. As a good faith gesture, he said, Naturex is offering to grant free licenses to Peruvian companies to use MacaPure in their products.

Qun Yi Zheng, PureWorld's former president and chief scientist, says the company invested more than $1 million and three years of research in the endeavor and that it popularized maca as a worldwide Peruvian export.

Peruvians "should not be so narrow-minded," Zheng said, but should instead be grateful. "After we studied it, put money into the research, (maca) has become a useful commodity."

A wide range of potency peddling maca-based products — from powders and pills to jams and candies — have helped triple Peru's exports of the plant from $1.3 million in 2000 to more than $3 million annually since 2003, according to the Exporters Association of Peru.

Japan was Peru's biggest maca customer in 2005, followed by the United States, Germany, Belgium and Canada.

Zheng's peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Urology in April 2000, showed that MacaPure greatly improved penile dysfunction in castrated rats. Also, lab mice fed the stuff for 22 days engaged in sexual intercourse up to 67 times in a three-hour period, compared with 16 times by less randy rodents deprived of the extract.

Peru contends PureWorld's alcohol-based extraction process simply mimics the centuries-old practice by Andean people of soaking dried maca root in Andean moonshine to release the libido boosters.

But providing scientific proof to show PureWorld's formula falls short of a "novel" and "useful" invention has proven elusive.

"We don't have the technology for this analysis and we have had to turn to a scientist in the United States who offered to do the analysis for free," said Manuel Ruiz, a director at the nonprofit Peruvian Society for Environmental Law and a member of Peru's National Anti-Biopiracy Commission.

Peru has also enlisted the pro bono help of Washington attorney Jorge Goldstein to prepare a legal challenge. He is examining, among other things, archives from rural Peruvian universities to demonstrate that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office failed to consider "prior art" — pre-existing knowledge that could be used to overturn the patent.

Chris Kilham, who conducted the initial field research for MacaPure in the Peruvian highlands, says he can see the issue from both sides.

"PureWorld, which did all of this work, found compounds that nobody knew existed before," said Kilham, a professor of ethnobotany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"On the other hand, the native people from whom the knowledge of especially the sexual applications of maca arise were not at all considered in these patents."

The specter of biopiracy in Peru dates back to the 1630s, when Jesuit priests took bark from the Peruvian cinchona tree — the original source of quinine — back to Europe, where it was hailed as a miracle cure for malaria.

Peru never got wealthy from the discovery.

Cinchona seeds were smuggled by the Dutch from Peru in the 19th century and planted in Java. Indonesia became the world's primary source of quinine.

The image of the cinchona tree was put on the Peruvian flag — a constant reminder of Peru's unrewarded contribution to one of the most important breakthroughs in medical history.

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