NIH AND U. OF GEORGIA CANCEL RESEARCH PROJECT IN MEXICO AMID LOCAL
PROTESTS

Bitter opposition from Mayan Indians has led the National Institutes of
Health and the University of Georgia to terminate a research project
involving the study of medicinal plants in Mexico. Local healers had
protested that it was inappropriate for American scientists and a British
drug company to profit from the plants, which many native groups say are
collectively owned.

The NIH and researchers at the university stopped the $2.5-million study in
the southern Mexico state of Chiapas this month. A coalition of Mexican
healers and midwives and a Canadian environmental organization had fought
the project for two years, charging that the research amounted to "bio-piracy."

Brent O. Berlin, a professor of anthropology at Georgia, led the project.
Mr. Berlin had planned to create an inventory of local plants and fungi
with the hopes of developing new therapies for many diseases, including
cancer and AIDS. Other partners included a Mexican university, El Colegio
de la Frontera Sur, and MolecularNature Ltd., a British pharmaceutical company.

Mr. Berlin, who declined to comment for this article, had established a
company called Promaya, which was designed to represent the interests of
Mayan people and to funnel 25 percent of the profits from any drug
discoveries to local villages. However, some groups in Mexico said they
feared that Mr. Berlin and his partners would keep the profits from the
research for themselves. Others simply said it is wrong to patent naturally
occurring plants.

"We think the project illustrates the fundamental right of local
communities to veto projects," said Hope Shand, research director of the
Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration, the Canadian
organization that lobbied against the project. "No matter how well-meaning
this project was designed to be, it did involve the privatization of
indigenous products and resources. It proved to be unacceptable."

The Georgia project in Mexico is one of six research studies financed by
the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups program, a consortium of
universities and federal agencies formed to study the environment and
develop new drug treatments using natural products. The program is
administered by the Fogarty International Center, the NIH's international arm.

Mr. Berlin, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is a leading
figure in the field of ethnobotany, the study of how people use native
plants. He had tried to revise the study to satisfy his opponents by
training local leaders in the drafting of ethical standards for research
and developing an informational campaign summing up the pros and cons of
research of local plants.

However, the Council of Traditional Indigenous Doctors and Midwives From
Chiapas, a group of local healers, still opposed the project. Last month,
the Mexican university withdrew from the study, effectively derailing the
entire effort.

In a brief statement published in Georgia's Athens Banner-Herald newspaper,
Mr. Berlin said that he and his researchers had "noble goals" and that the
Mayan people themselves would lose the most in the project's cancellation.

"If there is anything that leaves a gnawing feeling in my stomach about the
whole history of the controversy, it is the fact that our detractors have
carried out their attacks against the project by spreading rumors,
distorted claims or partial truths, and deliberate lies, from the very
beginning," said Mr. Berlin.