Bibliographic record
Abstract
February 2000 the US Patent Office issued a patent on a human gene to a Maryland biotechnology company, Human Genome Sciences (HGS). It had discovered and sequenced the gene thought responsible for preventing AIDS. HGS discovered that people who have a mutation of their patented gene appear not to contract AIDS, even after exposure to HIV, the AIDS virus. Within five months of that patent, HGS had received more than 100 additional patents and had 7500 pending patents on human genes. Just the patent on the AIDS receptor gene will give the Maryland corporation a monopoly over the gene, its protein, and all AIDS drugs developed through them. On the one hand, patent critics say now the corporation can restrict the numbers of scientists working on AIDS cures and drugs, unless they pay a hefty licensing fee to HGS. They also say the corporation did not invent this human gene, but merely discovered it. On the other hand, those who support the company make two responses. One is that it takes ingenuity and labor to find and isolate a given gene, and scientists should be rewarded for this effort. They also say the patents are awarded for new compositions of matter, like chemicals, not for genes in their natural state. What is patented, they say, deserves a reward because it is the isolated, characterized gene, on which corporate scientists have labored (Krimsky 2003, pp. 57-61). Scientists have labored not only on human genes useful for medical purposes but also on genetically engineered seeds (GES) in agriculture. Monsanto, the company holding the most GES patents, dominates the market with its RoundupResistant (RR) varieties of soy, corn, and canola. Eighty percent of all commercial GES crops are engineered mainly to make them herbicide resistant so that farmers can avoid labor costs by applying otherwise-lethal doses of herbicides. Although the US patent on Monsanto's Roundup, the best-selling herbicide in the world, ran out in the year 2000, by requiring all farmers growing their RR crops to sign contracts to buy only Roundup as an herbicide, Monsanto is assured of herbicide profits indefinitely into the future. Today Argentina, the US, and Canada are the main GES users, accounting for 99 percent of all GES cropland. In Argentina, 95 percent of all soybeans are transgenic; in the US, 54 percent. From 1996 to 2000, global GES cropland rose 2500 percent, to 100 million acres. One-fourth of US crop land is planted in GES. Globally, an area larger than the UK is planted just
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".