What they won’t do though is ripping off genetics
Even if you were the chairman of the board or the company's CEO, you could only speak to what a company would or would not do
right now. Company's
do change - otherwise, Bayer would still be using slaves for labor and experimentation. ("The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.")
How can they clone or tc a dry stem? They simply can’t.
Could be done in theory, at least. One method I read about last year, as one of its steps after sterilizing the sample, had "leave plant material in a laminar flow hood to
dry." And I watched an episode of Nova where they discussed cloning ancient, extinct animals, and they were hopeful but were concerned that the sample material might have degraded too much - but that was 50,000+ years old, IIRC, not months (or weeks, or "hey, it's dry, where did I put that postage-paid envelope?")
Whether it can be done by this company
in practice is another question entirely. But if it has investors, the potential for an influx of millions of dollars of capital is there.
As to patenting plants... I'm against it. I think if you create a new line out of one or more previously existing ones (which is how any of them get created, unless you want to wait around for the evolutionary process), you should properly credit those whose work you build upon, but that's different. It doesn't come with the ability for a patent-holder to say, "No, you cannot do that with *my* patented thing - in fact, you cannot do anything at all with it, because I refuse to license it to you."
As for being able to patent a plant (in general)... If I understand things correctly - which is by no means certain (standard disclaimer
) - all you have to do is add a marker gene which you own, something that allows you to prove that "your" organism is in some way different than before. Monsanto's Terminator gene comes to mind. Watson ("Sam the Skunkman") and RC Clarke seemed pretty excited at the prospect of creating strains that couldn't produce viable seeds a while back. "Because plants that do not have to devote energy to producing seeds can produce better bud" (might be paraphrased slightly). Which,
to someone who has never grown a cannabis plant, might sound sensible. But, gee, I don't know, has anyone ever managed to grow sinsemilla? Anyone, anyone at all? Don't be shy, step on up here <TS gets run over by the stampede
> . Yeah... I don't think that's the
real motivation behind this, do you?
Can't patent a cannabis strain? Think again. GW Pharmaceutical did it in Canada in 2005 under the Plant Breeders' Rights Act. The strain is called "Grace."
I won't provide a link, because most of them seem to be hosted on other cannabis-related forums. But performing a search for "Dr. Frankenbeanstein" will produce an interesting article.