DOCUMENTS
Subject:
Science
and the myth of British fair play
Date:
Tue,
17 Oct 2000 17:44:28 -0400 ()
From:
khalid.ali@utoronto.ca
To:
franzjutta@cantv.net
Franz,
I am here at the U of T attending a meeting.
I just took a break to
confirm that I will not be available for
tonight's chat. In the
meanwhile
please post this article to the Crew-a
good example of the "fruits"
of
intellectual labor and its consequences............!
Khalid
http://www.nationaudio.com/News/DailyNation/Today/Comment/Comment1.html
Commentary
Saturday, October 14, 2000
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Science and the myth of British fair play
By M.G. KIMANI
Many Kenyans are no doubt appalled by the news that a group of
British scientists researching an Aids vaccine with Kenyan counterparts
has
hogged all the credit by taking out a patent in Britain, leaving out
the Kenyans.
It concerns the DNA used in the vaccine. The project is based on the
findings almost a decade ago that Nairobi prostitutes working in the
Majengo slum have developed immunity to Aids. The vaccine has been
developed jointly with the Kenyan team.
That this disconcerting news should break bang in the middle of the
first Nobel Prize week of the new millennium is doubly disappointing.
In
an era of intellectual property theft, when piracy and plagiarism
have
invaded all fields of creativity and scholarship, the Kenyan team
responded to this unilateral manoeuvre in an uncharacteristically
restrained, even stiff-upper-lipped, manner.
Dr Job Bwayo, leader of the Kenya Aids Vaccine Initiative (KAVI),
told
the Nation: "Immediately we realised our names were not included, we
entered into correspondence with our collaborators to ensure we were
reflected as part of the researchers. We are waiting for the
outcome.''
The British Oxford University scientists are expected in Nairobi next
week, reportedly to address international accusations that they
jumped
the gun by patenting the vaccine without reference to the Kenyans.
There
were murmurs and uncharitable remarks across Kenya all day Thursday,
following the Nation's Page One story on local worries about the
Britons' move.
There was even talk of the manoeuvre being particularly "un-British''
and not a few despairing references to the whereabouts, in this case,
of
the much-vaunted "British sense of fair play''.
The Oxford team did not help their own case - if they, indeed, have
one
- by claiming, through Prof Andrew McMichael of the Oxford Institute
of
Molecular Medicine, that they had been forced to take out the patent
so
hurriedly and so secretively "to prevent other organisations doing
so''.
This is an explanation without a leg to stand on. Why not alert the
Kenyans before they did so, to ensure that the Kenyans understood
every
nuance and ramification of patenting so early and in Britain, and
fully
enjoin them in the patent?
Prof McMichael also tried to argue that the Oxford team are a
non-profit-making organisation. Hence this unseemly haste. What is
he
implying here? That the only dividend accruing from the vaccine's
development is of a financial nature? What about the vaulting peer
esteem, Nobel Prize glory and countless other awards and honours that
await the scientists who deliver the first truly successful Aids
vaccine?
Or was he implying that the Kenyan collaborators are so intrinsically
venal they would offer the vaccine to the first profit-making
pharmaceutical giant - or dwarf for that matter - who came along?
Whichever way one looks at the Britons' move, it smacks of the
precipitate, the grasping, the disingenuous - or worse.
We reported yesterday that Prof Lie Reidar of the University of
Bergen,
Norway, recently warned Third World scientists to ensure they enter
into
only well-defined agreements with their Western counterparts. It
turns
out that the University of Nairobi's Department of Microbiology team
collaborated with the Oxford team on the basis of only a memorandum
of
understanding drawn up long before the vaccine initiative, which is
completely silent on the all-important issue of patenting.
This is stultifying, supremely embarrassing; it makes our scientists
look deficient, at least in matters of judgment, incapable of
accurately
reading human nature and that other certified ass, the law.
It is, clearly, not enough to trust in the notion of British fair
play,
or of the English gentleman, as our scientists appear to have done.
These are 19th century myths that are as flimsy and romanticised as
the
fiction of the Noble Savage.
South African-born novelist Justin Cartwright recently examined the
phenomenon of Englishness, a very considerable component of which is
the
notion of British fair play, in two perceptive essays in London's
Weekly
Telegraph. Mr Cartwright is something of an Anglophile, and has lived
in
Britain since 1965, and the Telegraph is a most conservative
publication, indeed. Nonetheless, Mr Cartwright had cautionary words
for
the English, other Britons and the rest of the world about the notion
of the English gentleman:
"In Africa, the West Indies and India you will still find people who
admire an England that never existed, an England confected out of
oddments of history, of evolutionary theory and traditions that were
often invented in the 19th century. It was largely during the 19th
Century that one of the greatest artefacts of all was created - the
English gentleman. Even Charles Darwin at times allowed himself to
think
this fine creature was the end-product of evolution . . .
''It is now widely believed that the (British) Empire was a crude
affair, marked by greed, racism and exploitation. But even a cursory
knowledge of former colonies reveals a lingering admiration for the
fairness, disinterestedness and steadfastness - all gentlemanly
qualities - of the (British) ruling class.''
We might add that the notion of the English gentleman was passed on
to
the colonies and, later, the Commonwealth, Kenya (and highly educated
Kenyans) included, as the notion of British fair play. Like all
myths,
it is a problematic idea and a very fragile one, indeed, even on the
British Isles, as the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish and other more
recent British minorities would readily testify.
"British fair play'' is a slender thread indeed for Kenyans to hang
their hopes on for entering the annals of medical research,
development
and discovery. Only a water-tight and equitable international
contract/patent between the Oxford team and the Nairobi team can
begin
to do this.
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