Samhain New (Thanksgiving) Moon
When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.
The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news. This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA. No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.
In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down. Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs. As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one. Why? Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.
They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow. And they wanted to control as much of it as they could. Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident. This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.
We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost. As did most plant closing campaigns.
After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology. Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.