Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik of the Industrial Revolution were able to separate, collect, utilize, and exploit inanimate materials. Just as previous generations manipulated plastics and metals into the machines and products of the Industrial age, we are now manipulating and indeed transferring living materials into the new commodities of the global age of biotechnology. ... ... .... The raw material for this new enterprise is genetic resources. Just as the powers of the Industrial age colonized the world in search of minerals and fossil fuels, the biocolonizers are now in search of new biological materials that can be transformed into profitable products through genetic engineering.12 In the recent past, bio-technological development has been well known and taken for granted in the areas of disease-causing bacteria for the benefit of mankind. Life forms, i.e., products of nature themselves, are presumed under the traditional legal doctrine to be non-patentable. All this, however, has been radically changed by the US Supreme Court’s decision in 1980 to the contrary that life is indeed patentable. The brand new policy is thereby unilaterally created, opening the way for the US transnational corporations, with all the capital, technology and market well under control, to acquire the patenting of indigenous plants and animals, and hence knowledge. Since then, a good number of patents have been issued on cases like the neem tree and Basmati rice of India, Jasmine rice and medicinal plants of Thailand, and still many others to follow. All these incidents are already well known and so blatantly arbitrary. On top of that, there is also now the planned global patent regime under negotiation in the World Trade Organization, known as Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS), 12 Andrew Kimbrell, “Biocolonization: The Patenting of Life and the Global Market in Body Parts”, in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, ed., The Case against the Global Economy and for a Return toward the Local, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1996, pp.131-132. OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 37