Where's that damned plagiarism detector when you need it?
The Observer last Sunday drew attention to what it calls “biopiracy”. Syngenta developed a new kind of Busy Lizzie that trails, and is therefore a boon to the hanging basket business. which is big. It says that Syngenta’s original patent on the variety “describes this plant as having ‘no commercial significance’.” And it says that the people of the Usumbara Mountains of Tanzania, who share their ecosystem with the rare plant in which Syngenta found the “trailing” gene will get not a penny.
I’m not going to take issue with any of that.
I’m going to take issue with the wonderful, sublime, surely unintended irony of a Tanzanian web site’s secondary report on the matter, clearly casting Syngenta as the global villain, blithely stealing great gobbets of content from that global villain the Observer.
Life is too short to do a side by side comparison, but I'll make it easy for you. The Observer. ThisDay.1
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2021-08-31: It really is too bad, and yet somehow fitting, that I can find no trace of the Tanzanian website, but trust me: I know what I saw. ↩
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