
Indigenous Maize: Who Owns the Rights to Mexico’s ‘Wonder’ Plant? - caprorso
https://e360.yale.edu/features/indigenous-maize-who-owns-the-rights-to-mexicos-wonder-plant
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etaioinshrdlu
I'm quite against the private ownership of biological lifeforms, whether the
owner is Monsanto or an indigenous village.

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amerine
A simple upvote is not enough of a show of agreement for this perspective.
Genetics should not be own-able.

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colordrops
Genetics is information. Do you believe information should not be ownable? I
think we should not be able to own any information. Information is like fire.
It takes no space and costs nothing to replicate. Taking the concept ownership
developed with physical objects and applying it to information is ridiculous.
It's like owning clouds.

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msh
There is a difference between information naturally occuring and created by
someone.

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ciconia
Information is always created by someone. Creation does not necessarily mean
ownership.

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ijidak
Wait... Who created the information in DNA?

How does that tie to ownership?

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krageon
Nobody created it, the argument makes no sense in the case of naturally
occurring DNA.

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colordrops
Physical objects are not the same as information. We create all information.
Hard drives are just atoms arranged a particular way and how we interact and
process those atoms adds the information layer on top. Same goes for DNA.

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Animats
Discussion in Farm Progress.[1] The maize plant in Mexico requires a 9-month
growing season, so it's only useful in near-tropical climates. Work is
progressing to see if the trick that plant uses can be adapted to something
that grows faster.

For a plant to fix its own nitrogen carries an energy cost. So the plant grows
slower. There's a tradeoff here.

[1] [https://www.farmprogress.com/biotechnology/nitrogen-
fixing-c...](https://www.farmprogress.com/biotechnology/nitrogen-fixing-corn-
farming-s-holy-grail-when)

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selimthegrim
Previous post on the 'discovery' for reference:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721741)

