My Africa Today

Fear of bio-theft at centre of the storm
By JOHN MBARIA
Special Correspondent

As KWS exudes confidence over the deal, critics have asked it to tread with caution, particularly because it does not have the capacity to catalogue the extent and nature of the country’s biological resources that might be of industrial value and will be banking on Novozymes to supply such knowhow.

They point to the numerous instances of Kenya’s biological wealth having been stolen from the country’s nature reserves even with KWS personnel on the beat there.

One example was when industrially important microbes (or extremophiles) were stolen from Kenya’s Lake Bogoria and other Rift Valley lakes in 1992 and ended up being patented by a California-based company, Genencor International. This newspaper carried the story of how the microbes were used in manufacture of industrial enzymes that were then used to give blue jeans a trendy, faded “stonewashed” look, while others were used by a US multiproduct giant, Procter & Gamble, in the manufacture of one of its Tide detergents.

Last year, a 42-page document released by a US-based non-profit organisation, Edmonds Institute, reported that the microbes are now owned by Genencor, for which they have generated $3.4 billion in annual sales.

It further said the actual collection of the microbes from the Kenyan lakes was made in 1992 by an unnamed British researcher and later patented by Genencor.

According to the report, the Kenya government did not get a cent even after filing a suit against the company in US courts in September 2004 for compensation. But KWS Director Dr Julius Kipnge’tich told The EastAfrican that they are still negotiating with Genencor. “Negotiations are still going on,” he said, adding that if the negotiations failed to yield results, KWS would explore other options including taking “legal measures.”

Invariably, after developing industrial products from natural materials sourced from Kenya and other African countries, global biotech giants have been reluctant to share the billions with these countries even after being exposed. This has been a highly contentious issue related to the development and commercialisation of biological resources (bioprospecting) throughout Africa.

The Edmonds Institute’s report also detailed how one of the biggest drug manufacturers in Europe, Bayer of Germany, acquired a strain of bacteria from the Ruiru Dam in Central Kenya, and ended up developing a drug that is able to inhibit the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream of diabetic patients. The report said that although the drug had generated over $300 million by the end of 2004, Kenyans got nothing.

With all this history of sharp dealing, observers are now wondering why KWS failed to wait for proper legal and policy guidelines to be put in place before signing the MoU. The EastAfrican has learnt that the Science and Technology Ministry has been spearheading the drafting of a policy and a Bill to regulate how organisations like KWS enter into agreements with international biotech companies.

The policy will apparently offer a “radical” way of tackling past and ongoing bio-robbery in Kenya and detail guidelines on how to enter such agreements. When implemented, the law will also make it possible for Kenyans to take public bodies to court if they believe that the latter have played a role in the spiriting away of local knowledge and technology or have aided bio-theft.

But Dr Kipng’etich says the MoU with Novozymes was guided by the Kenya Access and Benefit Sharing Regulations issued by the National Environment Management Authority last year. He also says the deal adhered to the provisions of the Wildlife Act (Cap 376) and is also “in line with the Convention on Biological Diversity, which Kenya ratified in 1992.”

Hands as a calculator have many advantages over the pencil and paper methods in arithmetic. The students require no external device and can practice the procedures at any time or place. Rote memory of the addition and multiplication tables, facts that can not be visualized, is the most difficult memorization possible. Representing numbers with the hands provides the visuals needed to enable a much easier memorization process to occur. A good pedagogical approach is to have the students verify the addition and multiplication tables using their hands as a calculator.

2. Elijah McCoy* (1844-1929)
Responsible for a remarkable 57 patents, American inventor Elijah McCoy is best known for inventing ingenious devices to lubricate heavy machinery automatically. McCoy's devices were so reliable that people often asked if machinery contained "the real McCoy," likely giving rise to this enduring expression.

3. Lewis Howard Latimer* (1848-1928)
Although he received seven patents for his inventions, mechanical draftsman and inventor Lewis Howard Latimer is best remembered for his key contributions to the incandescent light bulb. In 1881 Latimer patented an electric lamp with an inexpensive carbon filament and a threaded wooden socket. He later joined Thomas Alva Edison's team of inventors and wrote the first known book on electric lighting.

10. Charles Richard Drew, M.D. (1904-1950)
American surgeon Charles Richard Drew conducted pioneering work in blood storage and transfusion techniques. Drew showed that blood plasma lasts longer than whole blood, a medical breakthrough that enabled the creation of the modern blood bank. In 1939, Dr. Drew used his new understanding of blood storage and transfusion to help establish the first blood banks to serve the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. He went on to become the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank.

THERE is hardly anyone born in Nigeria or sub-Saharan Africa who has not had an encounter with malaria at least once in their lifetime. Indeed, besides HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, malaria is now said to be one of the topmost killer diseases across the globe.

Worst hit by the disease are African countries, where it ravages communities, thus enforcing multiplication of efforts by governments at different levels to save their countries' populations. Each African country has designed its own malaria control and roll back programmes for implementation with global partners.

No fewer than half a billion cases of malaria occur each year say scientists, who have warned that the World Health Organization's estimates are off by nearly 50 per cent. Figures compiled by a team of tropical medicine specialists add up to 515 million clinical attacks of the deadliest form of malaria worldwide

The disease, which accounts for over 90 per cent of deaths in Africa, remains a heavy burden in the continent with devastating effects on her socio-economic welfare. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) weekly epidemiological records, the burden of malaria is weighing too heavily on the continent, especially within the poor.

Latest statistics hold that malaria kills between one to two million children each year in sub-Saharan Africa, while some 15 to 40 per cent of children with cerebral malaria, as well as malaria associated acidosis and anaemia die, half of the deaths occurring within 12 hours after arrival at the hospital.

Malaria is a parasitic infection transmitted to humans through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. The resulting disease in humans can be devastating. After spreading rapidly through the blood stream to the liver, the parasite emerges again into the blood stream, finally to settle in the red blood cells, where it multiplies and emerges in bursts of new organisms. These parasites, because of their large numbers, can cause particular damage to the nervous system, liver, and kidney.

In young children and adults who have not recently been infected - and therefore have not developed natural immunity - this cycle can result in death within hours from cerebral malaria. Others also die at a later stage in the infection from overwhelming anaemia or liver and kidney failure. Untreated, up to 20 per cent of persons infected with falciparum malaria die.

Four species of malaria infect humans, though only two, falciparum and vivax cause the vast majority of clinical cases and nearly all of the deaths and serious incidence of the disease. The disease is particularly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, and is common throughout tropical regions of China, India, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America.

Almost all of the serious morbidity caused by falciparum malaria occurs in children under the age of 10, and the impact is especially severe in those under the age of five. Protecting these children from malaria therefore, is a major goal of current malaria vaccine development efforts.

Malaria has a complex life cycle. Infected female mosquitoes inject malaria sporozoites, or parasitic cells that infect new hosts, when they bite, and they are carried to the liver where they rapidly infect liver cells. Without causing symptoms, these sporozoites undergo a radical change and multiply furiously over the next four to five days.

Tens of thousands of asexual stage merozoites, or daughter cells of the parasite, are released from each infected liver cell, each of which rapidly target and invade a red blood cell. Every few days, the merozoites multiply ten-fold and burst out to infect other red blood cells. This cyclic and massive increase in parasite burden gives rise to the clinical disease we recognize as malaria.

In the absence of immunity or drug treatment, death can occur within hours of noticeable symptoms. If death does not occur and infection continues, some of the parasites further differentiate into a form that is infectious for mosquitoes, thus permitting the life cycle to continue.

Strategies for developing malaria vaccines have been targeted at specific points in the parasite life cycle during which the organism appears particularly susceptible to the host's immune system

Children of less than five and pregnant women are population groups at highest risk for malaria morbidity and mortality. It is recorded that over 90 per cent of all malaria deaths in Africa occur in young children. Most often, they experience their first malaria infections during the first one or two years after birth, in forms of cerebral malaria, anaemia, diarrhoea, respiratory infections and other delicate diseases.

An estimated two per cent of children who recover from cerebral malaria infections suffer from learning impairment, disabilities, epilepsy and spasticity, according to WHO's Africa malaria report, 2003.

Much of the morbidity and mortality associated with malaria is caused by the rupture of iRBCs (infected red blood cells) during the stages of reproduction of the parasite by cell division. Intense fever, occurring in 24-72 hour intervals, is accompanied by nausea, headaches, and muscular pain among other symptoms.

The characteristic fever spike has been correlated with incremental rises in blood levels of cytokines or immune system proteins - associated with the release of parasite proteins during the rupture of red blood cells. Furthermore, a variety of potentially fatal symptoms, including liver failure, renal failure, and cerebral disease are associated with untreated P. falciparum

The immune system is the human body's natural defence apparatus for all infections including those of the malaria parasites. However, the immune response to malaria is not well understood. The presence of blood serum antibodies - the immune system's foot soldiers in the form of proteins - in individuals living in regions where malaria is endemic indicates that the immune system mounts a blood fluid response against the parasite.

This immunity is parasite strain-specific and can be lost if the individual migrates to a region where malaria is not endemic. Furthermore, the efficacy of the humoral or blood fluid response is limited by the intracellular behaviour of the parasite as well as its ability to alter its surface molecules through various stages of maturity

Since ninety percent of all malaria cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, preventing infection is especially important because resistance to anti-malarial drugs is a growing problem. This means that immunisation must come into the frame of medical assault on malaria. However the vast majority of vaccine candidates fail during development, making vaccine development an expensive and financially risky endeavour.

Nonetheless the need for a malaria vaccine is urgent, but unfortunately traditional market forces are not strong enough to prompt substantial investment in vaccines that protect against a disease that primarily affects people in developing countries.

To be continued.

When Africa breaks free from the grip of poverty and famine—as it now looks poised to do—Monty Jones, 56, will have played a pivotal role. A native of Sierra Leone, Jones is the revered plant breeder who developed NERICA, the New Rices for Africa, a set of high-productivity rices adapted to West Africa's growing conditions. Jones' efforts in creating NERICA are legendary. He and his team painstakingly crossed varieties of Asian and African rices to find stable and fertile breeds that would combine the yields of Asia's plants and the toughness of Africa's. NERICA is now being taken up by farmers across West Africa, boosting food security and incomes. Jones' work has also helped inspire other groups to support an African Green Revolution. The payoff will be a healthy, well-nourished continent on a path to economic development.

Philip Emeagwali was voted history's greatest scientist (#1) of African descent — and the 35th greatest African of all time — in a survey for the September 2004 issue of the London-based New African magazine. President Bill Clinton extolled Philip Emeagwali as “the Bill Gates of Africa” but his fans countered that “Bill Gates is the Philip Emeagwali of America.” Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, the Nobel Prize of supercomputing.

In this day and age when Japanese, Chinese or anyone remotely resembling Asian descent is automatically presumed to hold superior mathematical and technological aptitude, Dr. Emeagwali poses a refreshing reminder (1) to the world that intellectual gifts come in all races, creeds and colors; and (2) to Igbos that when we strive for excellence, there is no limit to what we can achieve ... so strive for excellence!

Philip Emeagwali, biography, supercomputer scientist, Internet pioneer, mathematician, inventor.

So who is Philip Emeagwali, and what has he done that has made him so famous? Emeagwali first entered the international limelight in 1989 when he received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for performing the world's fastest calculation at 3.1 billion calculations per second. This calculation was remarkable not only because it was twice as fast as the previous world record, but also because of the method used to achieve this phenomenal task. Rather than use a multimillion dollar supercomputer, Emeagwali used the Internet to access 65,536 small computers simultaneously (called massively parallel computers).