Late in March, members of the US Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL; Washington, DC) and coalitions representing indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin took steps to discourage bioprospecting in that region of South America. Attempting to prevent ownership of the materials derived from the Amazon, the organizations filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO; Crystal City, VA) calling for officials there to reexamine and revoke US Patent #5,751 covering the Ayahuasca plant, which produces hallucinogens and other potentially medicinal products. This patent, issued in 1986 to Loren Miller, an independent Californian researcher, grants rights to any compounds derived from a special plant cultivar of the Ayahuasca plant. Miller intended to develop medicinal products from the cultivar, but never did. The petition argues that the patent misrepresents the nature of the cultivar and that it is no different from what is found in nature; if this is true, parts of the patent are not tenable. However, the request to PTO is far broader, according to CIEL senior attorney David Downes. "There is a growing concern...that biological diversity derived from their territories may be used as a commercial resource without any provision for benefit sharing. Intellectual property [claims] may have expanded too far into public domains...so we have asked PTO to open its review more generally to take account of cultural and moral values."