Patent applications do not require any actual working technology, they only
require the ability to, perhaps speculatively, describe a technological
process in sufficient detail.  I think that the "submit a working model"
requirement is only pulled out when someone submits something that appears
to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

 

So, patents and preliminary papers aside, I still fail to understand why
someone with a viable RNAi technology would be wasting time on corn rootworm
as their first application.  I will quote one of my own prior postings to
Bee-L when we were speaking of IAPV:

 

"And if Beelogics [Monsanto] has anything even close to a viable anti-viral,
why would they focus the technology on bees, when one might focus on more
serious and far more profitable problems than IAPV, such as HIV-AIDS, H1N1,
Hepatitis-C, Hepatitis-B, West Nile, Rotavirus, HPV, Rift valley fever,
Measles, Hantavirus, Rabies, Yellow fever, and Dengue?    I can see bees as
a good testbed for very early stages of a semi-working technology, as IRBs
will prohibit human testing and painstakingly review animal testing, but
approve insect testing with only a cursory review.   But no one has put the
tangible status of the anti-viral technology into perspective for us."

 

Is corn a more profitable market than all the human diseases above?  Is no
one at Monsanto/Beelogics interested in a Nobel Prize in medicine? Or is the
technology far too shaky for human use, and agriculture is a testbed?  Not
sure I like that idea.

 


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