The workshop was great. We had a very enthusiastic group of participants and I really got the feeling that we actually provided many of them with useful information and tools that they can apply when they return home. With some of these activities, the context feels like a drop of water in the desert but here, many of the participants had already heard of LMOs, they were interested in addressing the issue at home, they had a good base to work from and they were asking the right questions. Very rewarding.
The challenge now is to continue the momentum once we all get back to our regular, daily tasks. And that includes me! I have a lot of work to do to improve the Collaborative Portal for Customs Officers that we have created in the Biosafety Clearing-House. I know it could be a better tool for follow-up and continued engagement after each of these regional workshops. By all means, watch the Portal page and keep me honest.
But now, on to the star of the show – Slovenia itself. This is honestly one of the most beautiful countries I have visited and we have arrived at my favourite time of year – spring. The weather has been fantastic, the leaves are coming out and many of the fruit trees are in bloom. Even the lilacs are just starting.
We have had chance to see a little bit of Ljubljana, spend an evening in Bled and an afternoon in Koper (to visit the port) + Piran. The scenery is breathtaking, the people are unbelievably friendly, the restaurants are affordable and everywhere feels very safe. I can’t say enough good things and I truly want to return on vacation – perhaps to catch some ski racing at Maribor or Kranjska Gora.
Thanks to our local organizers for taking such good care of us (spoiling us, really) and making the visit such a pleasure.
One thing I was very much looking forward to the past few months was the opportunity over the holidays to catch up on some reading. Having had a cold/the flu/food poisoning for the better part of the past two weeks has indeed given me plenty of time to curl up with a cup of tea and some library books. You can see what I’ve been perusing over on the ‘what I’m reading’ page.
While it isn’t really apropos of biodiversity, it has been a bit of a strange confluence of books and I wanted to share some thoughts.
I just finished Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s account of the economic meltdown of September 2008. The first thing I noticed was the remarkable lack of women in the narrative. This was indeed an old boys’ club. Another thing that has always struck me is that if a company is ‘too big to fail’, is it not de facto anti-competitive? And if the solution to the problem was, in part, to merge financial companies together to create even bigger companies, does this not just make the economy more monopolistic and even less competitive?
I was also struck by how much the banking and financial systems still operate on faith and don’t really seem to have a whole lot to do with rationality. So long as everyone trusts each other and each others’ institutions, they’ll lend money. As soon as the trust is gone, the lending stops and the ‘system’ comes to a crashing stop. While it seems as though the loss of trust in Lehman Brothers and AIG were justified by the less than great conditions the companies were in, by the end, the pressure being felt by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase was a plain, old-fashioned run on the banks that was based on panic rather than on the reality of the balance sheets of these companies.
And maybe it’s just me but the idea of a run on the bank always makes me think of the climax of ‘Mary Poppins’.
The part of the book that I found the most telling was in the epilogue:
While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.
Machismo, ego, greed and lack of hubris seemed to be the human characteristics at the root of the crisis in the first place. It doesn’t look like a government bailout has done anything to fix those problems.
On the same day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, British artist Damien Hirst started an auction of his work at Sotheby’s in London. The auction was unusual as artists normally sell through dealers and galleries rather than auction houses. It was also unusual as Hirst considered the auction itself a work of art – he called it Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. The auction grossed £111,576,800 making it the then-highest single-artist auction sale ever.
This past summer, the hubby and I went to see the Pop Life exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada. While most of the works didn’t constitute art in my books, it was the most thought-provoking art exhibit I think I’ve ever seen. My interpretation is that contemporary art isn’t so much about the art as it is about the artist. Their primary interest seems to be to exhibit (in some cases, literally) themselves and to make themselves into brands. I don’t have a problem with artists making money but by the end, the whole thing reminded me of Wal-Mart. When did everyone want to become a brand? More puzzlingly, why do people want to become brands? It strikes me as very unappealing.
The gift shop at the National Gallery included the book Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. A bit in the introduction caught my eye:
One theme that runs through the narratives of Seven Days in the Art World is that contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. … For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existential channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence.
Or as Kanye West tweeted on Nov. 14th:
I’ve finally realized as long as you use profanity when you talk about art and fashion it’s better accepted!!!
And who are some of these believers in contemporary art who will spend millions of dollars to purchase a work? Why hedge-fund managers, of course!
Up next on the reading list: Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Then I think it’s time for some fiction.
Cablegate over on Wikileaks has been riveting us here at Blogging Biodiversity for the past week. I can’t say I’ve been terribly surprised or shocked by any of the revelations so far but it’s one thing to know this sort of talk is going on, it’s another to see it written in black and white.
But what does this have to do with biodiversity? Well at least two of the 800+ cables that have been released so far make direct reference to the CBD and/or GM crops.
The most direct reference is in a cable dated 31 July 2009 from the State Department to US embassies, consulates and missions around the world asking diplomatic personnel to collect and report various types of data regarding the United Nations.
It is a lengthy cable but if you scroll about three-quarters of the way down, you’ll find a section on ‘Climate Change, Energy, and Environment’. It falls under the heading ‘Other Substantive Issues’ on which the State Department wished to receive information. The list in this section includes the following:
– Efforts by treaty secretariats to influence treaty negotiations or compliance.
– Information on the Convention on Biological Diversity, particularly on access, benefit sharing and bio-safety.
So the US Government was interested in the ABS negotiations as well as our ongoing discussions on biosafety. Not too surprising but interesting nonetheless. It would be more interesting, though, to know what information they received in response. Perhaps this will be revealed in some cables to come.
And does this mean we are doing our job right if we are drawing the attention of the US Government?
Also on the biosafety front is another cable this time from 16 April 2009. It was also issued by the State Department and sent to US embassies in a number of African countries as well as the CIA, if I understand the header correctly. The cable outlines the data that the State Department wanted collected and reported regarding certain African Great Lakes countries, namely the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. The issues of interest include ‘food security and agriculture’, including this item:
– Government acceptance of genetically modified food and propagation of genetically modified crops.
(Thanks to the article by Tom Laskawy over at Grist for drawing this one to my attention.)
Anyone find any other such references in the cables? Please feel free to leave them in the comments.
As an aside, while I’m not a diplomat per se, I do work in the field of international diplomacy. I was thus reassured to see that it appears as though human beings everywhere have the same sorts of discussions when they think these exchanges are going to be private – or at least stay private for a while.
NB: Given the problems Wikileaks has been facing in staying online, I have provided links to the cables as published by The Guardian newspaper. I figured these links would be more reliable. For those who would prefer the links to the direct sources on Wikileaks, you can find them here:
- 31 July 2009 cable
- 16 April 2009 cable
Home from work last night, ready to relax into the weekend and watching a little TV to begin the process. Specifically, I was watching ‘Jeopardy!’. For those not familiar with it, Jeopardy! is a quiz show with an answer-and-question format – contestants are given an answer and must come up with the correct question.
The past two weeks on the show have been the 2010 College Championships and last night was the final game to determine the college champion.
Let’s just say I was pretty excited when I saw the final Jeopardy answer, the very last clue in the contest:
************
As I try to write from somewhere over the Pacific, my head is swirling with thoughts and it feels good. I am on my way back to Montreal from Nagoya and MOP-5 and COP-10. I have gone I think 31 hours without sleep and I am not sure why I am wide awake now. The past month and the past three days in particular have been a swirl of emotions and I don’t know what’s worth sharing and what’s not. I guess I’m a bit out of practice. It’s been a while since I blogged.
While I try to get back into blogging mode, I’ll try to put in writing the stream of consciousness I’m currently experiencing. The TVs here in the plane have already shown a couple of things about the meetings in Nagoya. First, they showed the NHK news. The feed is in Japanese so I didn’t understand what they were saying but there were images panning the plenary hall – showing friends on the Canadian delegation looking very serious and whispering to one another – and the reporter standing in the rain outside the conference centre. I guess I’ve never really seen anything I’ve done on the news before, not like this anyway, where you can see other people watching. It made it seem worthwhile (more on this in a minute) and relevant and important.
The other thing was ads that JAL is running for the International Year of Biodiversity as well as COP and MOP. I knew this was something the airline was doing but again it made it very real. It brought to mind something that happened at some point over the past few weeks. I was hurrying down the escalators in the Nagoya Congress Centre to the ground floor on a quest for someone or something. As I walked down the escalators, I saw the TV screens showing various videos and, in this case, something about IUCN’s latest red list and assessment of endangered species. The statistics flashed on the screen – 30% of amphibians are endangered, 21% of mammals are endangered. Suddenly, my search for a CRP from docs or whatever I was doing seemed very trivial and the larger reality of the Convention on Biological Diversity hit home. It made me want to pause and watch the rest of the message in the video but ironically, or I don’t know what, my mission was urgent and didn’t allow time for big picture philosophical thinking at that specific moment. I am still thankful in hindsight, though, for the reality check as it makes me appreciate what I do and hope that I and my colleagues are at least somewhat successful in serving this treaty and its aims.
During this trip to Japan, myself and a colleague were invited to speak to a class of Masters students in environmental law at Kobe University. One person suggested I describe what it is we do as a Secretariat – so much of our work is behind the scenes that it can be hard to get an idea of our actual jobs.
I took up the suggestion and tried to explain our mandate and our specific tasks in organizing and servicing meetings – from notifications to logistics to pre- and in-session document preparation to assisting chairs. This is all true. But as I sat on the plane for the first leg of my trip home, I was suddenly alone with the rest of my colleagues scattered around the rest of the plane. It was one of the first times it had happened in weeks apart from the few short hours I’d spend in my hotel room sleeping at night. Otherwise, we were spending many hours together in small rooms working as a team. I have said it before and I am sure I will say it again but you have to get along with the people you work with when you are servicing a meeting otherwise it is going to extremely unpleasant and much more difficult than necessary.
But where I was really going with this is that much as we may bitch and moan about the long hours and the frequent tedium, the meetings are really exciting and exhilarating and, well, fun if you want them to be. I like the camaraderie and team spirit that we develop as a result of the shared experiences, especially the shared pain. We laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves and currently, the thought of going back to my office and sitting by myself to work makes me a bit, well, sad.
And what’s not to like about going to a reception hosted by the Government of India (hosts for MOP-6 and COP-11) and watching Japanese girls do Indian dancing and sharing a glass of wine with a German and a dance with a Malaysian and congratulations with an Australian? I had a fabulous time and was surprised at the extent of the relief I felt that the meeting was essentially over and was successful beyond anything I had imagined. I want to hang on to the happiness for as long possible and draw on it during some of the more tedious days that are bound to arise in the coming winter months in Montreal.
The fatigue is catching up with me and I have rambled long enough. Perhaps I have had too much sake with dinner. I will stop before I make it 32 hours without sleep but I look forward to being back on the blog again soon.
I am just back from Nagoya, Japan and servicing GFCC-4, MOP-5 and COP-10. A surprising number of people that I met in Nagoya mentioned that they missed the blog and they hoped I’d find a way to write again despite the limitations of my current job. Perhaps the flattery has gone to my head but I’ve been inspired to respond and I will work to figure out a way to use this as a creative outlet to discuss biodiversity issues.
Working for the secretariat of a UN multilateral environmental agreement means that my job is to be neutral. But the blog has always been about analyzing the things I now work on. We do a lot of self-censorship at the CBD Secretariat, not wanting to risk offending anyone and making life and the goals we wish to achieve more difficult for ourselves. My job does provide me with the opportunity to write and be creative but I don’t necessarily get to choose the subjects I wish to explore. Any suggestions on the directions for the blog are welcome in the comments.
While I try to sort all this out, I’ve got a post ready to go that I wrote on the plane on the way home. I have a feeling it is going to sound a bit delirious but I will post it in the next day or two as I think it’s an honest account of the emotions I was experiencing at the end of COP and in its immediate aftermath.
It’s also been over two years(!) since I posted anything here so please bear with me while I try to sort out whatever updates are needed to the site.
It’s always nice to have chance to go back and update things you were looking at a few months, or in this case, more than a year ago. In February 2007, I blogged about Tim Roberts’ application for patenting jokes. This prompted much discussion in the comments between him and I as well as a further post on my part. I thought it would be nice to take a look to see where the patent application stands now.
It turns out that on June 3rd of this year, the USPTO sent Mr. Roberts a ‘non-final rejection’. Unfortunately, the language of the rejection is much less entertaining than the language of the original application.
In paragraph 6, the patent examiner rejects all the claims in the patent application “because the claimed invention is not supported by a credible asserted utility.” The patent examiner also stated that the claimed invention does not fall within one of the four statutory classes of invention under US patent law, i.e. it is not a process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter. I liked the dryness of the next bit:
In particular, it is unclear as to what statutory class of invention a “joke” falls under. Additionally, it is unclear as to what statutory class of invention a “patent application” and “application” falls under.
The claims were also rejected on the grounds that they did not distinctly claim the subject matter that the applicant considers to be the invention. Paragraph 14(a) of the reasons states that:
Claim 1 recites “protecting a novel joke”. A person of ordinary skill in the art is unable to determine the metes and the bounds of the Applicant’s invention because the word “novel” is subjective.
I love how, with no apparent irony, the patent examiner can refer, on the one hand, to the standard of ‘a person of ordinary skill in the art’ as though it is somehow plain and obvious who this metaphoric person is and what the ordinary skills are that he or she possesses, and then proceed to state that the claim is rejected because the word ‘novel’ is subjective!
I must confess that I haven’t checked on the status of the application in the other countries where it was filed but if the US isn’t broadening its scope of patentability to accommodate your claims, I would say that things aren’t looking too good for you.
I am glad, then, that I did not take up Mr. Roberts on his offer of ‘very reasonable terms’ for a license for the subject matter claimed by his patent application. According to the cover pages that accompany the ‘action’ from the USPTO, though, Mr. Roberts has three months to reply to the non-final rejection from the date of its mailing. All is not necessarily over then and I believe three months brings us to September 3rd, just over a week away. So I turn the floor over to Mr. Roberts and invite him to give Blogging Biodiversity a sneak peak at what his next actions might be.
I am currently holding in my hot little hands my very own copy of Patenting Lives: Life Patents, Culture and Development. The book is edited by Johanna Gibson and published by Ashgate. I authored chapter 2 – ‘Life as Chemistry or Life as Biology? An Ethic of Patents on Genetically Modified Organisms’. Thanks to my lovely husband for the illustrations in the chapter. You can see the full cite for the chapter on my publications page.
The book is the product of the Patenting Lives conference, which I attended way back in December 2005 (see here and here). I see also that fellow contributor, Luigi Palombi, has been in the news lately in Australia where the company Genetic Technologies has announced it will enforce its patent rights over the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, see stories here and here. I’ve written on the BRCA gene patents in the past, particularly in the piece on ‘Health Care and Access to Patented Technologies’ (sorry, the link from my publications page is broken. I will work on fixing it as part of the housekeeping.) It’s interesting to see debates on the gene patents taking place in other countries as well as concerns being expressed about the effects of these patents on the price of health care .
I also see where the occasional paper on the relationship between the CBD and the ITPGRFA co-authored by myself and Christine Frison has been cited in a recently published article in the Journal of World Intellectual Property. The article by Claudio Chiarolla looks at ‘Plant Patenting, Benefit Sharing and the Law Applicable to the Food and Agriculture Organisation Standard Material Transfer Agreement’. You can find the article for free in both html and pdf format here. I’m hoping that the occasional paper might be available in a couple of other languages in the not too distant future as well.
Finally, I still have some publications in the pipeline so there will be more news on this front down the road.
It has been a while since I posted anything and there are some things that I’ve been wanting to post about. I was off at MOP-4 to the Biosafety Protocol in May when the blog was attacked by spammers. I upgraded to a new version of WordPress, hence the current more spartan look to the blog. I am currently on holiday from my regular job and so will try to do a few updates over the next few days.
At the very least, I’ve managed to go through the backlog of comments and approve the valid ones and delete the spam. Thanks to all who’ve commented, I’ll endeavour to reply as I do some housekeeping.
I haven’t been checking the stats for hits to the blog lately so I don’t know if I still have any faithful who are looking in periodically for anything new. If there are, thank you and I promise some new material over the coming days and hopefully, I’ll fix up the new look of the blog also.
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