Who owns what in the high tech, bio tech age?

Harvard University owns a species of mouse that’s susceptible to cancer. Amazon.com says they own the idea of “one click shopping.” The Monsanto Corporation owns its own amber strains of grain.

The “Harvard Mouse Patent:” Claim 1.
A transgenic non-human mammal all of whose germ cells and somatic cells contain a recombinant activated oncogene sequence introduced into said mammal, or an ancestor of said mammal, at an embryonic stage. [U.S. Patent No. 4,736,866]

Biotech companies are trying to own our DNA code, gene by gene. Lots of American universities are trying to own all the ideas that come out of their labs. Some Shakespearean scholars have even gone to court over the ownership of an interpretation of Hamlet.

Meantime, there’s no defense against people freely building CD collections online, nor anyway to make sure the musicians who wrote the music get paid. Even Frank Sinatra would have trouble collecting his royalties these days, but with the human genome about to be published, and patented, could he still claim ownership of those old blue eyes?

The battle for intellectual property – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Seth Shulman

How far would you go for what you believe in?

In 16th century England, Thomas Moore defied his king and died for Catholicism. Mahatma Gandhi scrubbed toilets to free India. German families risked their lives and hid Jews during WWII. Nelson Mandela gave 25 years in prison to end apartheid. Copernicus rightly placed the sun at the center of the universe but his colleagues dismissed the theory and him, until after his death.

In pursuit of equality Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus. Students in Tiannamen Square wouldn’t give up their ground. In the name of Jesus, Arthur Blesset has been carrying a 12 foot cross on his shoulder for some 34 thousand miles and counting.

And to save a redwood forest from loggers, Julia Butterfly Hill lived in a tree for two years and survived fierce winter storms and public harassment. What would you sacrifice for your convictions?

It’s the principle of the thing, on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Julia Butterfly Hill

The preeminent teacher of Palestinian thinking in the United States has a new lesson plan.

Edward Said, now in his mid-60s, lives in the shadow of leukemia, and political disappointment, relieved in a measure by a university teaching life in literature and music. But when he thinks of the Middle East and the hope of his children for peace and reconciliation, Edward Said’s prescriptions have changed.

He says Palestinians will never get the sovereign statehood for which Said himself made common cause with Yasir Arafat. Neither will Prime Minister Barak or any Israeli government get the wire-fence and checkpoint separation they seem to want from Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.

The problem is that ideology of separation, on both sides: for people living on top of each other indefinitely, Said says, salvation will be coexistence, equality, integration. People, not governments, will achieve it, he says.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Edward Said

Carl Sandburg called Pete Seeger “America’s Tuning Fork.”

The radical balladeer who knew that as long as he could play the banjo he would never starve to death, is synonymous with almost every American uprising of the latter part of the 20th century: The Civil Rights Movement. The Vietnam War Protests. He worked for workers rights and to clean up the environment.

And he’s not mellowed or slowed down with age. The 81 year old folklorist will look you in the eye and proudly say, “I am still a communist,” even after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era and receiving a Kennedy Center Honors Medal from Bill Clinton.

Now that he’s helped clean up the Hudson River, he’s turned his thoughts to new technology and is wondering where have all the poor people gone in the planning stages of this brave new way of communicating?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Pete Seeger

Benjamin Pogrund’s title was “African Affairs reporter” for the old Rand Daily Mail in South Africa – meaning he covered what white South Africans, and newspapers, called “the native problem.”

After 1960, when he got the job, Benji Pogrund was covering a three-decade “war of words.” And the revolutionary black democrats led by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were not the only enemy of the Afrikaaner government and its policy of racial separateness.

The trick was to get stories of black life and protest, and labor strikes, past the Official Secrets Act and then past cautious editors. Most black news was routinely blacked out, but for a conscientious white reporter like Ben Pogrund, there were big thrills. As when he was put on trial for reporting the squalor of South African prisons, and the police major told him: “You’re the enemy. We’ll stop at nothing to get you.”

The news business in old and new South Africa is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Benjamin Pogrund

Susan Sontag was a bookish girl from California who decided she wanted to have it all, and did. Her hunger was to know everything. In the 1960’s and ’70’s, her essays on camp and photography made her an icon; her famous white streak made her a celebrity; and, her bouts with cancer a survivor.

In the next thirty years she also became a filmmaker, a playwright, a human rights activist, and a novelist. She’s ruminated about the meaning of illness, she’s directed Beckett plays in Sarajevo under siege, and she’s devoured Kant, Rousseau, Kafka, Henry James – the list of her heavy hitters is endless.

As a young graduate student she said she decided to become a writer because “what [she] really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.”

Now deep into her sixties, Sontag says her best writing is still ahead of her.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Susan Sontag, author of “In America: A Novel”

Nuruddin Farah won honors, and readers, around the world, for his novel “Secrets.”

It is set in Somalia in East Africa in the early 90s: there are wild elephants and vervet monkeys in the real and mythic background; there is a brutal showdown of clan warlords just waiting to break out; but in the foreseeable future there is also a global economy and world culture coming, strong enough to overwhelm, maybe pave over the many layers of a Somalian consciousness.

Those layers include pagan magic and juju powers out of Somali folklore, also Islamic traditions of belief and worship, also modern memories of Italy’s colonial years in Africa. “Secrets” is the story of one young high-tech businessman’s search for his origins, to find whether his father really fathered him.

But it reads too like a fable of African identity-like Nuruddin Farah’s own inquiry into how the puzzles, pleasures and perspectives of his own past will be preserved.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Nuruddin Farah

Charter schools have been hailed as the cure/panacea/answer to our failing school system. They’re private schools with public funding.

Parents choose for their kids to attend, teachers choose to teach there and the government foots the bill. Charter schools are free from regulation. They can teach the kids the way they want to, but, in the end, the kids have to pass the same standardized tests that all the other public schools kids do.

So how are they doing? Chester Finn, education guru and charter school expert, has just written their report card and the grades are all over the place. Boston’s City on a Hill School is thriving, but the Renaissance School in Douglas County, Colorado shut down after three years because of lackluster test scores.

While Chester Finn analyzes the data, Michael Goldstein is getting his hands dirty. He’s started his own Charter school set to open this September.

Charter schools – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Chester Finn and Michael Goldstein.

Algorithm from Britannica.com:
“Systematic procedure that produces–in a finite number of steps–the answer to a question or the solution of a problem. The name derives from the Latin translation, Algoritmi de numero Indorum, of the 9th-century Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi’s arithmetic treatise “Al-Khwarizmi Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning.”

An algorithm has nothing to do with a groovin’ Al Gore and everything to do with everything else.

The mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski calls algorithms the “second great western idea” – the first being calculus. If calculus gave birth to modern science, he says, algorithms have created the modern world.

The concept of the algorithm began with Aristotelian logic and took centuries to crystallize, but it’s ultimately a deceptively simple idea: think of it as a recipe or a code – a set of precise instructions that uses symbols to convey information. So a command like “go fetch the newspaper” could be an algorithm.

But algorithms are also what make computers possible. They can help us solve physics problems that are beyond the limits of calculus. And Berlinski says they’re even a metaphor for life: they let us think about human intelligence, molecular biology, and evolution in new ways.

The world of algorithms – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

David Berlinski

The giant sucking sound in the American business world is the rush of young talent leaving business schools, law schools, banking and industry for the start up world of dot.coms. They’re driven by the fear that the golden dream will pass them by.

And by greed too. You can have it all in the internet economy, not just a lot. You can be big and fast. Smart and rich. Working and happy.

The business models that built American enterprise are ancient history now. Corporate loyalty, working your way up the company ladder, training and experience – not even to mention the idea of profits and real companies that make real things.

Nearsightedness, the short term and the IPO are what matter now and failure is the ultimate badge of success. It means you’ve experienced the downside. Is anyone starting to ask if this is any way to run a railroad?

The new business model – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Glen Rifkin