Micro

Danny Minot struggled at the tail end of the group. For some reason, Danny had brought his tweed jacket to Hawaii, and he was wearing it now. Sweat poured down Danny’s neck and drenched his button-down shirt, and he skidded from place to place on the trail in tassel loafers. He blotted his face with a pocket square and pretended to ignore his misery. “Mr. Drake,” he said, “if you happen to be familiar with post-structuralist theory-uh-you might be aware of how-ugh-whoof!-how we can’t actually know anything about this forest…For you see, we create meaning, Mr. Drake, when really there is no meaning in nature…”

Drake seemed unfazed by Danny. “My view of nature, Mr. Minot, is that we don’t need to know the meaning of nature in order to make use of it.”

“Yes, but…” Danny went on.

Meanwhile, Alyson Bender drifted back a few paces, and Peter ended up walking with Rick. Rick nodded toward Vin Drake. “Do you believe this guy? He’s like Mr. Biopiracy.”

“I’ve been listening to your remarks, Mr. Hutter,” Drake said, twisting his head around suddenly, “and I have to say it’s completely false. Biopiracy refers to the taking of indigenous plants without compensating the country of origin. The concept is attractive to the ill-informed do-gooder but fraught with practical difficulty. Take the example of curare, a valuable medicinal drug, used in modern medicine today. Surely someone should be compensated? Yet there are dozens of different recipes for curare, developed by many tribal groups stretching across Central and South America-a vast area. The curares differ in ingredients and cooking time, depending on what is meant to be killed, and on local preferences. How, then, do you compensate native medicine men? Did the shamans of Brazil do more valuable work than the shamans of Panama or Colombia? Does it matter that the trees used in Colombia migrated-or were transplanted-from native Panama? What about the actual formula? Is the addition of strychnos important or not? How about the addition of a rusty nail? Is there any consideration for public domain? We allow a drug company twenty years to exploit a drug, then make it public. Some say Sir Walter Raleigh brought curare back to Europe in 1596; certainly it was well known in the 1700s. Burroughs Wellcome sold curare tablets in the 1880s for medical purposes. So by all odds, curare belongs in the public domain. And finally, modern surgeons no longer use curare from native plants anyway. They use synthetic curare. You see the complexities?”

“This is all corporate evasiveness,” Rick said.

“Mr. Hutter, you seem to enjoy being the devil’s advocate against my points,” Drake said. “I don’t mind. It helps me sharpen my arguments. The truth is, using natural compounds for medicine is just the way of the world. The discoveries of every culture are valuable, and all other cultures borrow from one another. Sometimes discoveries are traded for a price, but not always. Should we license the horse stirrup from the Mongols who invented it? Should we pay the Chinese for domesticated silk production? For opium? Should we track down the modern descendants of Neolithic farmers of ten thousand years ago who first domesticated food crops in the fertile crescent, and pay them? How about the medieval Britons who learned to smelt iron?”

“Let’s move on,” Erika Moll said. “We take your point even if Rick doesn’t.”

“Okay, the point is that claims for biopiracy of plants really can’t occur in Hawaii because there are, strictly speaking, no indigenous plants. These are mid-Pacific volcanic islands that rose from the surface of the ocean as barren, hot lava plains, and everything growing on them now has been brought from elsewhere-by birds, by wind, by ocean currents, by Polynesian warrior canoes. Nothing’s indigenous, although some species are endemic. The legalities of the situation are one reason why, in fact, we have located our company in Hawaii.”

“Evading the law,” Rick mumbled.

“Obeying the law,” Drake said. “That’s the point.”

They were coming to an area of chest-high green leaves, and Drake said, “Now, we call this area Ginger Lane, with white, yellow, and kahili ginger. Kahili has those foot-long red stems. The trees above us here are mostly sandalwood, with the typical deep-red flowers, but there are also soapberry and milo trees, with large dark green leaves.”

The students were turning, looking in all directions.

“I assume you’re all familiar with this, but in case you’re not, this spiky, striped leaf is oleander, and it will kill a human being. One local man died from grilling meats over a fire on an oleander stick. Children sometimes eat the fruits and die. In addition, the very large tree off to your left is a strychnine tree, originally from India; all parts are fatal, the seeds most of all.

“Next to it, that tall shrub with the star-shaped leaf is the castor bean plant, also fatally toxic. But at very low doses, castor bean compounds may have medicinal properties. I assume you know that, Mr. Hutter?”