Nom de Plume
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2014
- Messages
- 827
OK. I see there needs a post to end all disagreement. It is long, yes. But you can either get over it and learm something, or you can go around it and persist in your ignorance. The choice is not mine to make. You can lead a horse to water, but...
Anyway, basically you're all lacking sufficient creativity here, I regret to say.
Corporations don't need to patent plants. All they'd have to do is follow the methods of Monsanto or industrial agribusiness and agricultural economics, in general
For example, they could effectively monopolise and control the production of a given plant by simply genetically modifying the seeds of the plant such that the seeds grow plants which produce no additional fertile seeds (genetic use restriction technology).
The intended and direct effect is requiring every grower to either buy more seeds after each harvest or to grow their own plants from vastly inferior seeds (which have not been genetically modified to grow plants to be as productive, resistant, profitable, or otherwise superior to those produced from the corporations' exorbitantly-priced seeds).
Further, they could have all prospective buyers of their seed (after eliminating the possibility of buying seeds elsewhere) to sign a legally-binding contract ensuring the buyer must do and mustn't do any number of things (terms and conditions) with their product (i.e., seeds), which makes the buyer legally obliged to the seller in such a way as to be hopelessly dependent upon the seller for any and all future purchases of the seller's seed lest, again, they be forced to accept the unappealing alternatives that are:
a.) using inferior seed
b.) using no seed
Then, they could patent the technology of these genetically modified seeds so that nobody can ever modify their plants (specifically, their particular type of plant. Say, corn, lettuce, or even cannabis if we see the legalization advocates get their druthers) to have any uncannily similar genetic modifications (such as a specific insect, particular pesticide, or some environmental resistance) lest that farmer find himself slapped with an unwinnable lawsuit and have his whole business and/or life utterly destroyed and thence subsumed by the corporation to which they're indefinitely legally binded (with the threat of suffering with poorer or no crops in lieu of strictly obeying the unreasonable punition accompanying the transgression of contractual legal stipulations, which the buyer better have not or thought not to do, if they don't want a torrential and tortuous litany of litigation to come raining down from a cloud of callous corporate-sponsored castigation and costly courtroom comeuppance).
In fact, agricultural business is far more profitable theoretically than is pharmaceutical business, but the latter just generates more profit (by virtue of the market it deals in).
Yet Big Pharma is simply not able to equip itself with as many exponentially more profitable legal protections as the former, because chemistry—the basis of drug design and development and, hence, pharmaceutics itself— doesn't offer many techniques or novel, undiscovered innovations to be disinterred out of the study of chemical synthesis.
For example, a total synthesis via manipulation of very specific biosynthetic pathways, or even a total synthesis via a precisely modified additive manufacturing procedure, or better yet some newfangled way to computationally facilitate drug design via QSAR modus using a patented algorithmic synthetic mechanism combined with a biosynthetic manipulation technique.
Imagine printing all chemicals of any section of chemical space (say, all amphetamines or all arylcyclohexylamines) one wants as if they were printing out pages of a document from a paper-ink printer.
Consider that: browsing a Google-like search engine of chemical space, rather than cyberspace, to find something novel and then just clicking it to print, or additive manufacture, chemical after chemical from a compilation of chemicals just like page after page from a compilation of pages. That would make pharmaceutics rapidly outpace their agricultural corporate cousins in terms of unbridled domination of chemistry like industrial agriculture's unbridled domination of agriculture.
But currently, Monsanto alone easily outdoes Pfizer or any other near trillion-dollar tentacle of mega-Big Pharma in a way heretofore unseen and unwanted, in terms of legal immunity, technological sophistication, scientific innovation, etc.
If drug companies can be argued to have got their hands clenching the drug business by the balls, then Big Agribusiness has got the whole planet in a titanium, multi-ton hydraulic testicular vice and a Fort Knox-esque vault-locked chastity device.
Anybody wanting Monsanto to be controlling cannabis production, whch they will once it is legal, say "Aye".
Nay?
But, I thought cannabis legalization would be a good thing? Didn't it work for alcohol?
Oh, yeah! That's right. Alcohol, too, was once held in favor of legalization. Now, after the people got what they wanted and knew what dangers would await them, they're now bitching insufferably about "Big Alcohol", just like now in this very thread. How ironical and preposterous. Don't people ever learn from history?
Anyway, basically you're all lacking sufficient creativity here, I regret to say.
Corporations don't need to patent plants. All they'd have to do is follow the methods of Monsanto or industrial agribusiness and agricultural economics, in general
For example, they could effectively monopolise and control the production of a given plant by simply genetically modifying the seeds of the plant such that the seeds grow plants which produce no additional fertile seeds (genetic use restriction technology).
The intended and direct effect is requiring every grower to either buy more seeds after each harvest or to grow their own plants from vastly inferior seeds (which have not been genetically modified to grow plants to be as productive, resistant, profitable, or otherwise superior to those produced from the corporations' exorbitantly-priced seeds).
Further, they could have all prospective buyers of their seed (after eliminating the possibility of buying seeds elsewhere) to sign a legally-binding contract ensuring the buyer must do and mustn't do any number of things (terms and conditions) with their product (i.e., seeds), which makes the buyer legally obliged to the seller in such a way as to be hopelessly dependent upon the seller for any and all future purchases of the seller's seed lest, again, they be forced to accept the unappealing alternatives that are:
a.) using inferior seed
b.) using no seed
Then, they could patent the technology of these genetically modified seeds so that nobody can ever modify their plants (specifically, their particular type of plant. Say, corn, lettuce, or even cannabis if we see the legalization advocates get their druthers) to have any uncannily similar genetic modifications (such as a specific insect, particular pesticide, or some environmental resistance) lest that farmer find himself slapped with an unwinnable lawsuit and have his whole business and/or life utterly destroyed and thence subsumed by the corporation to which they're indefinitely legally binded (with the threat of suffering with poorer or no crops in lieu of strictly obeying the unreasonable punition accompanying the transgression of contractual legal stipulations, which the buyer better have not or thought not to do, if they don't want a torrential and tortuous litany of litigation to come raining down from a cloud of callous corporate-sponsored castigation and costly courtroom comeuppance).
In fact, agricultural business is far more profitable theoretically than is pharmaceutical business, but the latter just generates more profit (by virtue of the market it deals in).
Yet Big Pharma is simply not able to equip itself with as many exponentially more profitable legal protections as the former, because chemistry—the basis of drug design and development and, hence, pharmaceutics itself— doesn't offer many techniques or novel, undiscovered innovations to be disinterred out of the study of chemical synthesis.
For example, a total synthesis via manipulation of very specific biosynthetic pathways, or even a total synthesis via a precisely modified additive manufacturing procedure, or better yet some newfangled way to computationally facilitate drug design via QSAR modus using a patented algorithmic synthetic mechanism combined with a biosynthetic manipulation technique.
Imagine printing all chemicals of any section of chemical space (say, all amphetamines or all arylcyclohexylamines) one wants as if they were printing out pages of a document from a paper-ink printer.
Consider that: browsing a Google-like search engine of chemical space, rather than cyberspace, to find something novel and then just clicking it to print, or additive manufacture, chemical after chemical from a compilation of chemicals just like page after page from a compilation of pages. That would make pharmaceutics rapidly outpace their agricultural corporate cousins in terms of unbridled domination of chemistry like industrial agriculture's unbridled domination of agriculture.
But currently, Monsanto alone easily outdoes Pfizer or any other near trillion-dollar tentacle of mega-Big Pharma in a way heretofore unseen and unwanted, in terms of legal immunity, technological sophistication, scientific innovation, etc.
If drug companies can be argued to have got their hands clenching the drug business by the balls, then Big Agribusiness has got the whole planet in a titanium, multi-ton hydraulic testicular vice and a Fort Knox-esque vault-locked chastity device.
Anybody wanting Monsanto to be controlling cannabis production, whch they will once it is legal, say "Aye".
Nay?
But, I thought cannabis legalization would be a good thing? Didn't it work for alcohol?
Oh, yeah! That's right. Alcohol, too, was once held in favor of legalization. Now, after the people got what they wanted and knew what dangers would await them, they're now bitching insufferably about "Big Alcohol", just like now in this very thread. How ironical and preposterous. Don't people ever learn from history?
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