A slew of posts from me, as I've been a bit delinquent, but this is a short one.
So, I asked the question in class, but I still wonder, why didn't the Wente family patent their strain of the Chardonnay, the Wente Clone.
Monsanto is a massive, U.S. agricultural and agrochemical company, which was bought by Bayer last year in a $66Bn merger. The reason I mention Monsanto is that they have been producing genetically modified strains of corn and other agricultural products for decades. In addition to creating such strains, they have also been patenting these strains as proprietary inventions. While Monsanto is an unpopular name among the general public, they have been using GMOs and now new gene editing technology, such as CRISPR to create new strains of crops for decades. They are then able to sell these crop strains to other farmers and reap substantial financial benefits. There was even a Supreme Court case (too many legal references, I know), upholding their patents in 2013 and their right to control the distribution, sale, and use of such products.
One wonders why the Wente family, with its extremely popular chardonnay clone, never patented their own genetically modified strain. Perhaps being a wine grower in a small community means something different and leads to more humanistic tendencies than a pure profit seeking company. Had the Wente family had the foresight, however, they might be able to extract large rents from all the wine growers across the state who make the very popular Chardonnay with the Wente Clone (then again, that might mean higher prices for all the white wine drinkers out there). Any way food (or rather cheaper Chardonnay) for thought.
Is it possible to patent / protect something you didn't discover or create? The Wente family brought the Wente clone to the U.S. from Burgundy, but they didn't genetically modify it. (Also, this was 1912, so I'm not sure the idea of IP protection on genes would have crossed anyone's mind!)
ReplyDeleteOf course, what they can do (and what they actually do) is protect the Wente name and limit who can advertise that their wine comes from the "Wente clone" of the Chardonnay grape. (Though the value of that claim -- and therefore Wente's ability to control it -- is unclear, since the vast majority of U.S. Chardonnay comes from the clone.)
https://grapecollective.com/articles/how-the-wente-chardonnay-clone-became-americas-choice
Good point on the timing. It was definitely before DNA and double-helix was known, but I believe farmers and others knew about basic genetic material / genes since the mid-1800s with Mendelssohn.
DeleteIP laws in the U.S. definitely existed for (part of our Constitution), and the way I understood it is the Wente's imported this strand from Burgundy and then through selection and growing of the best strains in CA produced the new Wente Clone. Probably would make an interesting argument about whether that was true IP or not - but from your link it sounds like they were just happier to share the best strains with the local community to create a wine growing region, which in the long run may have been better anyway for creating great CA Chardonnays.
And you're right, people probably didnt generally know to patent agricultural strains at the time (dont think anyone did it until the 1970s or 80s).