Sam Knight
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) is housed in a bland office on a quiet street in Geneva. Since it was formed in 1947, it has produced guidelines for pretty much every aspect of human life you can think of and a lot more besides. Its work is absolutely vital, and yet almost universally overlooked. Standards touch your life wherever you are standing: in your clothes, your bathroom, the road signs that you read. They are a kind of pedant’s potion that makes the world go round.
I visited the ISO’s headquarters last autumn, during the organisation’s three-day general assembly. Pieces of 60th anniversary birthday cake lay half-eaten on desks. Aware that I was in the spiritual birthplace of such standards as the ATM machine, the ISBN number and the A and B system of paper sizes, I asked the head of communications, Roger Frost, if there was a single room where all the world’s standards are kept. “This is where we keep the gold,” Frost said as he led me into an underground room where the organisation’s 16,455 standards are held on a hard disk the size of a video recorder. He told me never to reveal the location. “We’ve never had a terrorist threat, as such,” he said. “But you never know.” Standards had never struck me as a potential terrorist target. In fact, before I went to Geneva, they had never struck me much at all. But despite being a rather abstract thing to blow up, they satisfy two requirements of terrorist targets: they are marks of civilisation, and they are an intrinsic part of the global economy.
A standard is an agreed way of doing things. Metrology—the science of measurement—is a prime example. Trade and industrialisation would be impossible without common scales for mass, size and volume. “We need a ton of steel”: how could you communicate this without a commonly agreed measurement? Standardisers are often asked to explain their work, and most delegates I spoke to at the ISO’s general assembly turned out to have a way of describing it to people they met at parties. Lars Flink, the chief executive of the Swedish Standards Institute, sought to explain the benefits of standards to me in terms of priests’ feet. He said that measurements in Sweden used to be made according to the size of the local vicar’s foot. “It was okay if you stayed within your village, but if the other priests were bigger or smaller, it made it very difficult to trade between villages.”
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John Browning
Despite the hype, Apple’s new iPhone doesn’t do much new. Shelves already groan with devices that can email, browse the web, play music, make phone calls and send text messages. The iPhone’s claim to fame is simply that it does these things more easily and with more panache than its rivals. But if it works as promised, that could still be enough both to make money and to kickstart a transformation of media.
How? A successful iPhone would make it apparent that media can and should change. While the internet has created some world-changing new technologies—the web and email, to name two—its impact on existing media has so far been negligible. Despite years of babble about convergence, telephony, video, music and the internet have continued to run along separate tracks. The iPhone brings them together. It is the first truly converged device with a real shot at the mass market.
This means that a successful iPhone will alternately delight and frustrate. Delight because it is indeed cooler and easier to use. Frustrate because it will highlight how much cooler and easier to use media could yet be. Why doesn’t my phone know where I am, to provide local maps and recommendations? Why can’t I get the same videos and music on both sides of the Atlantic? Why can’t I send my friend a video clip as easily as I now send a picture from the web? Why can’t my phone tell me where it is, dammit?
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Azeem Azhar
The recipe for Coca-Cola is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world. Yet a small Canadian software firm has sold 150,000 cans of a rival fizzy cola, which tastes very like Coke, and has made the recipe public. The firm behind the drink, Opencola, makes software, not drinks. It used the drink (and its open recipe) as a metaphor for the most important trend in software today.
Unlike most traditional software firms, Opencola produces open source technologies. Open source is a philosophy for software licensing designed to encourage the improvement and use of software by anyone who wants to join in. It ensures that the source code, the underlying instructions of the software, can be examined and modified freely.
The open source movement eschews proprietary controls and its software is usually produced not by firms, but by networks of volunteers who look after different pieces of an application. For this reason it has, until recently, been regarded as anti-corporate-associated with hackers’ bedrooms and academia, an eccentric corner of the market.
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Kevin Watkins
The Mexican tourist resort of Canc?n is preparing for the mother of all off-seasons. In September, trade ministers and their entourages from 146 countries will descend on the town, accompanied by a small army of global justice activists. The attraction is a meeting of the Word Trade Organisation (WTO). It promises to be a defining moment in the evolution of globalisation. At stake are two questions. Will the rules-based trading system survive at all? And, if so, will the rules be used to strengthen the links between trade and poverty reduction?
Failure in Canc?n will do to the global trade system what Iraq did to the UN: leave it marginalised. It will also accelerate the US-led trend towards bilateral and regional trade deals, unleashing a wave of power politics in international trade. But success will require more than avoiding a breakdown in negotiations. If “multilateralism” is to survive, Canc?n needs to create the foundations for a new order in international trade.
Rich countries recognised this when the decision to launch a new trade round was taken at Doha in November 2001. Meeting soon after the 11th September terrorist attacks, they implicitly acknowledged that the WTO’s rules were failing developing countries, the majority of the institution’s members. The new round, they promised, would be a “development round” redistributing the benefits of trade towards the poorest countries and people.
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Richard Horton
The pharmaceutical industry is an easy target-too easy sometimes. Take a television camera crew to any African hospital and you will find people dying from diseases-Aids, chest infections, malaria, tuberculosis, meningitis-that are entirely treatable. Thousands of deaths stack up in the world’s poorest countries because people are denied access to essential medicines.
NGOs, such as M?decins Sans Fronti?res and Oxfam, have made a persuasive case to governments and the public that big pharma’s paramount concern is to protect its intellectual property at the expense of the lives of the poor. Pharmaceutical companies reply that they cannot be a national health service to the world. As businesses, they owe legal responsibilities to their shareholders. The job of a drug company is to design, market, and sell new medicines, while protecting its intellectual property as far as it reasonably can. Western food companies, they point out, are not vilified when starvation strikes Ethiopia.
If big pharma does sometimes seem to be attributed with more than its share of responsibility for the world’s medical troubles, there are other issues where it escapes too lightly. Medicines, for example, kill as well as cure. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest killers in the industrialised world. And it is officially licensed to be so. This seems an extraordinary claim. What is the evidence for it?
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Shereen El Feki
In Nairobi, AIDS activists are celebrating a rare victory. After months of vacillation, the Kenyan parliament recently approved a law allowing for the importation of generic, or copycat, versions of patented anti-retroviral medicines without their patent-holders’ consent. Many people believe that opening the market to generic copies will bring down prices for millions of HIV-infected Kenyans faster than any discount offered by giant drug companies.
Meanwhile, in the Puna highlands of Peru, poor farmers are furious about patents issued to two US companies giving them exclusive rights to market maca, a potato-like plant and popular aphrodisiac, in America. The Peruvians say their traditional crop is not a novel invention, and that the patent unfairly restricts their ability to sell it in the US.
Evidently patents are a bad thing for poor places-or so many argue. They are largely the preserve of western multinational corporations, giving them a licence to establish monopolies, drive out local competition, divert R&D away from the needs of poor places and drive up the prices of badly-needed goods. Patents prevent poor people from getting life-saving drugs, interfere with traditional farming practices and allow foreign “pirates” to raid local riches without getting permission or paying compensation.
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Philippe Legrain
Rigged Rules and Double Standards
Kevin Watkins and contributors
(Oxfam International)
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Shereen El Feki
In the oasis villages around Ouarzazate, beneath Morocco’s Atlas mountains, globalisation is bearing strange fruit. The kasbahs bristle with satellite dishes; caf?s offer mint tea and “il internet”; and the call to prayer is accompanied by the ringing of mobile phones.
But some western exports remain out of reach. Azithromycin is a powerful antibiotic which stamps out all sorts of bacteria, including the one which causes blinding trachoma. This is a problem for 1.5m Moroccans living in the region, where the disease is often carried by flies which flit about infected eyes. While good hygiene and surgery go some way to mitigating the disease, drugs are crucial to tackling it.
The country’s health ministry has tried mass treatment with an old-fashioned medicine called tetracycline, which requires six weeks of twice-daily dosing, a regimen which few patients will follow. By contrast, a single dose of the newer drug azithromycin keeps patients clear of the bacteria for a year. But azithromycin is expensive, and the government cannot afford to treat more than a small fraction of patients. Last year, however, the drug’s biggest manufacturer and patent-holder, the US pharmaceutical firm Pfizer, donated $18m worth of azithromycin to Morocco through a new foundation, the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI). Now, 600,000 people have been treated, and the Moroccan government is bullish about eliminating the disease in a few years.
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Richard Reeves
Twenty people-specialists, experts, thinkers-sit around a seminar table. They might be discussing education, or the US stock market. Although people are speaking, no one is saying anything.
At least half of the participants have an original idea at the front of their mind. But they do not share it because it is too valuable. They are afraid that one of the others will steal the idea and use it, publish or sell it before they do. Their intellectual property is at risk. So received wisdoms are recycled.
Images of the new economy are of speed, complexity, hubbub. You get the sense that it will be a noisy place. In fact, such is the fear of being intellectually gazumped that the new economy may echo to the sound of silence.
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Tom Wilkie
Every night, as most of Britain sleeps, the computers at the Sanger research centre near Cambridge wake up and chatter briefly to the internet. Unreadable to all but the expert eye, their message consists of long strings of the four letters A, C, G, T repeated in different combinations.
These electronically published letters are spelling out the most important story ever written: the message of human heredity encoded in DNA. An international collaboration of scientific laboratories, of which the Sanger centre is part, is engaged in reading the entire human “genome”-every one of the 100,000 or so genes that makes a human being. By the year 2005, at a cost of $3 billion, the Human Genome Project-funded mainly by governments and public sector bodies-will be complete. The sequences of A’s, C’s, G’s, T’s which spell out the genetic code will have been teased out of human DNA and placed in the public domain for all to read.
But in May this year, the ordered progress of this project was rudely jolted. An American scientist, Craig Venter, broke ranks and announced a commercial deal with Perkin-Elmer, the company which makes the DNA analysing machines. Together they would use Perkin-Elmer’s latest analysis technology to sequence the human genome themselves, and they would do it in half the time for one tenth of the cost.
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