Friday, Jan 10, 2003
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Tamil Nadu
By Our Special Correspondent
The deliberations over the next three days would end in a Food and Agriculture Bio-Technology policy statement. Though this would not be an official one, the MSSRF chairman, M. S. Swaminathan, said the draft statement would help the Government think in that direction. He said that many of the dialogue initiatives of the Foundation had resulted in official policy statements. "The question is how we can develop a win-win situation so that everyone will benefit,'' said Prof. Swaminathan, in his inaugural address, emphasising the need for social inclusion and pointing to the challenge of expanding inequity, at the `inter-disciplinary dialogue on new technologies: reaching the unreached - 50 years after the discovery of the DNA double helix - the legacy of Watson and Crick.' Outlining the issues involved, he said that there was the need to combine genetic efficiency with genetic diversity. He suggested the creation of a `patents bank' as one of the responses to react to the emerging scenario. The `bank' could hold voluntarily donated patents relating to important discoveries in food, health and environment. These should be accessible to all. Secondly, there was a need for a new breed of professionals - Managers of Science. He pointed out that to inspire public confidence it was necessary to set up a Bio-Technology Regulatory Commission with multi-stakeholder participation. The director and UNESCO Representative, India, M. Tawfik, said advancement of scientific knowledge and technological skill had been accompanied by ethical doubts. "It becomes a duty to entertain such doubts when science is paving the way for the transformation of human beings by human beings.'' Though it was known that scientific research often had unexpected results whose implications could not be foreseen, efforts should be made to assess the possible consequences, based on the main aim of the project. "The research work itself is not, then, what is in question. Knowledge is always positive; it is its application that can be negative or even perverse. We must, therefore, look seriously at the possible applications of basic research and accept only those which relieve suffering,'' he said. The UNESCO condemned human cloning, Prof. Tawfik said and added that its Director General, Koichiro Matsuura, had called upon the international community to act without delay on the issue. Raising another crucial issue, he said that though it was agreed that scientific progress should benefit the whole world, this did not happen in practice. "What real chance do developing countries have of gaining access to those benefits (of scientific progress)? Considering the rise in health costs, are these countries in a position to afford these services? What attitudes would pharmaceutical companies and Governments themselves adopt towards increasingly expensive forms of treatment? How can we avoid the abusive and sometimes even more costly use of products obtained through genetic engineering?'' he asked. The World Food Prize Laureate, Gurdev S. Khush, outlined the development in the field ever since the DNA double helix. The MSSRF executive director, P.C. Kesavan and the MSSRF principal scientist, Ajay Parida, highlighted issues pertaining to the recent advances.
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