Peru claims rights to a natural Viagra
JUNIN, Peru -- In a small storefront on a bleak, wind-swept Andean plateau, Timotea Cordova offers an oxygen-deprived visitor a traditional elixir to ward off the breathless effect of the high altitude.
Dropping a few shriveled tuber roots into a blender, the 80-year-old Quechua Indian shopkeeper promises with a playful glance that the concoction will also provide a leg up later in the bedroom.
For hundreds of years, Quechua Indians have grown maca, the frost-resistant root that thrives in these frigid Andean highlands, to boost stamina and sex drive. The root, they believe, is nature's bounty and belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.
Maca growers and indigenous organizations were outraged when, in 2001, a New Jersey-based company, PureWorld Botanicals, received a US patent for exclusive commercial distribution of an extract of maca's active libido-enhancing compounds that it branded as MacaPure.
Peruvian officials called the patent an "emblematic case" of biopiracy and are preparing to challenge it in US courts.
The maca dispute is just the latest collision between indigenous people and commercial interests over so-called biological prospecting, the growing practice of scouring the globe for exotic plants, microbes, and other living things ripe for commercial exploitation.
Bioprospecting has huge potential for good, say researchers who go to sea, climb mountains, and trek to obscure corners of the world in search of exotic and undiscovered life.
A 2005 UN University report concluded that 62 percent of all cancer drugs were created from bioprospecting discoveries. The venom of a deadly sea snail found off the coast of the Philippines led Elan Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop the painkiller Prialt, which US regulators approved in 2004. The key ingredient in the breast cancer drug Taxol owned by
But bioprospecting is mostly unregulated, and there are mounting calls to establish legal frameworks for such work.
The Convention on Biological Diversity produced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro entitled nations to a share of the profits from substances yielded by their flora and fauna. It was ratified by 188 countries -- but not the United States, which argues that such a requirement stifles innovation and would undermine the patent system.
That hasn't stopped some of the world's poorest countries, which also hold the richest pockets of natural biodiversity, from fighting to apply the convention to international patent law.
Peru hopes the MacaPure dispute will become a pivotal case in attempts to require all patent applications to disclose the source of genetic materials.
Alejandro Argumedo, a Quechua Indian agronomist and activist, says Naturex, the French company that bought PureWorld in 2005, has no right to "privatize knowledge that belongs to an entire region."
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. 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.
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 that PureWorld's alcohol-based extraction process simply mimics the centuries-old practice by Andean people of soaking maca root in moonshine to release the libido boosters.
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."
AP Writer Paul Elias contributed to this story from San Francisco. 
