...the type about which you are concerned?

Penicillin is a naturally occurring biological product. Were the original patents on penicillin outrageous acts of "biopiracy?"

Here is the first patent on penicillin, dating from 1948: US 2442141 A

Biopiracy or not?

Personally, I get a little annoyed when people who know no science whatsoever, have never spent the thousands of hours in laboratories, sometimes at great personal risk, get their underwear in wedgies when scientists want to be paid for their work.

Ethnobotany is a well known academic discipline that requires a huge amount of training in a cross functional setting that can be challenging to the extreme.

That "deadly nightshade" was observed to have cardiac effects did not mean that it was a product that could not be improved by patented work. Digitoxin dosing can be precisely controlled; eating the plant from which it is obtained, "deadly nightshade" cannot.

In fact the name of this drug, digitoxin says something about the need to patent the process by which it is obtained from, um, a natural product, a highly toxic plant.

The supposition that folk medicine is superior to medicinal chemistry, be it natural products chemistry, or derived chemistry, such as is represented by the case of the important breast cancer treatment, taxol, is just ignorant to the extreme.

The meme by which people who despise science and scientists by continually impugning the motives of scientists with specious self righteous assertions of their own ethical purity is in fact, any thing but ethical. It's just ignorance masking itself as righteousness, and from where I sit, there's entirely too much of that going on these days, often as bad or worse on the left as it is on the right. There is nothing estimable or ethical about ignorance.

If you wish to assert that big bad corporations are seizing folk medicines from tribal folk medicine practitioners by citing patent law, produce some evidence of it, as well as some evidence of actual harm.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.