myEven in the hot summer sun, the stagnant pools and hard rock walls of Ribblehead Quarry in North Yorkshire seem like an unlikely frontier of the artificial intelligence industrial revolution. Standing beside a waterfall gushing from fractured rock, Bupe Mwambingu reaches into the green sludge behind the waterfall and emerges with a handful of seaweed.
Precariously balanced on the rocks, the researcher passes the dripping mass to her colleague Emma Bolton, who notes its GPS coordinates and the acidity, temperature and light exposure on a phone app.
“Be careful,” Bolton tells Mwambingu as he staggers to the edge of the waterfall, and they continue on to another part of the old limestone quarry, in search of more dirt and grime.
The couple, who work for London-based startup Basecamp Research, are collecting genetic information. organisms that hide in the recesses of rocks. In the past, scientists who wanted to develop new products from a rare lichen, microbe or fungus had to visit its habitat and collect a sample. Now, the genetic codes derived from these organisms are almost always exchanged digitally, through genetic signatures known as digital sequencing information (DSI).
This exchange is now at the centre of an international battle over who owns the natural world’s genetic data and who should benefit from the multi-billion-dollar discoveries derived from it. In October, world leaders will meet in Cali in Colombia at Cop16the World Summit on Biodiversity, to try to conclude a groundbreaking global agreement on this issue.
Low-income countries – where much of the world’s biodiversity remains – are hoping to spend billions of dollars on preserving the rainforests, lakes and oceans where these organisms live.
The examples of what is at stake grow every year. The discovery of heat resistance Aquatic thermos bacterium In 1966, at the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, DNA became a crucial ingredient for rapidly copying DNA in the polymerase chain reaction process used in Covid-19 testing. Plastic-eating bacteria could be a breakthrough for recycling.
Treatments for Alzheimer’s disease are being created using a drug Synthesized from snowdropsand researchers are studying whether molecules in chestnut leaves can Neutralizing drug-resistant bacteriaBolton’s sister, who has leukemia, is being treated with a drug derived from a sea sponge.
“Before,” Bolton says, “I would walk around and not realize how much biodiversity there is in every little thing I looked at. Now, I want to try everything.” She and Mwambingu head to a shallow pool with red and yellow edges, which looks like it’s on the edge of a volcano. They stop again to take samples.
“There are so many new bacteria and species and… really innovative applications that are saving lives,” he says.
Access to the digital genetic codes of microbes harvested from this quarry will be sold to feed voracious artificial intelligence models that are generating potential discoveries of new drugs, proteins and materials that could one day be worth billions of pounds.
Companies are under no obligation to pay for access to digital forms of biodiversity, even if these lead to lucrative commercial discoveries. Scientists working in industry have free access to important databases on digital biodiversity, but the information is often not even labelled with its country of origin.
The debate over the ethical use of nature’s data – and who should benefit from it – is intense. The natural world has long been the basis for commercial discoveries, particularly in medicine..
But anger is growing in some countries, as they say they have been deprived of the economic benefits of their biodiversity, while digital sequencing allows pharmaceutical and other companies to commercialize their flora, fauna and other life forms without sharing the benefits. They accuse those who collect and monetize genetic information of “biopiracy” and propose a solution: a global system that regulates the sharing of digital genetic information and forces companies to pay for the genetic information they use.
IDiscussions on the issue threatened to spill over into international biodiversity negotiations in Montreal in 2022, with some countries warning they would walk away from the talks unless efforts were made to resolve the issue. Countries eventually agreed to create a fund. But the details of how it will actually work are still undecided, and it is expected to be one of the most divisive issues in Colombia..
The issue is at the heart of long-standing tensions in UN biodiversity negotiations, where countries in the global north have pushed for a focus on nature conservation but many in the global south want to focus on how nature can be sustainably exploited to enable economic development.
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Any deal faces considerable hurdles. Setting up a global system to monitor and distribute the benefits of DSI could cost millions of dollars, and there is little clarity about where the money would come from. Whatever is agreed will not be legally binding, and its implementation will depend on the goodwill of governments and multinationals.
“The whole issue will revolve around the legality of the COP decisions,” he says. Pierre du Plessisa Namibian negotiator at Cop15 who advises African countries on the DSI. “There will be a decision by the Cop and after that, it will be up to everyone to play fair and turn it into a motor for mobilizing resources to protect biodiversity.
“Ever since this UN convention was adopted, what has always been missing is that it is more profitable to protect nature than to destroy it,” he says. “I remain optimistic and I believe that people will consider it the right thing to do.”
For now, the threat that some countries will begin restricting access to health information remains hanging over the debate. Sharing the genetic code of COVID-19 was crucial to creating vaccines quickly, and restrictions could hamper future scientific research. Universities, research institutions and companies also face growing reputational risks from their use of the data.
In 2019, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a leading genetics laboratory in Cambridgeshire, was… accused of misuse of African DNA and was ordered to return samples it had collected from indigenous communities in southern Africa after a whistleblower claimed the DNA information was being used to develop a medical research tool that could have been commercialized.
In the early 2000s, the Kenya Wildlife Service threat of legal action against Genencor and Procter & Gamble, alleging that a detergent was using enzymes obtained from a soda lake in the country.
Companies like Basecamp have been created to help researchers and companies avoid such disputes. Under Basecamp’s system, the owner of the biodiversity site receives a royalty if it successfully contributes to a commercial discovery, voluntarily putting in place a system similar to the one expected to be negotiated in Cali.
With its team of data scientists and professional explorers, the company has taken samples from the ice caps of Iceland, the seabed off the coast of Malta and national parks in Malawi, and the microbial data has been sent back to the same centre. Over the past three years, it has received considerable support from Silicon Valley.
Basecamp has already paid royalties to sites where the samples have started the process toward a commercial discovery. Ribblehead, which is run by the Wild Ingleborough nature restoration project, received a modest sum of £250, but that figure will increase as the commercial product is developed.
“It’s really extraordinary,” says Andrew Hinde, director of the Wild Ingleborough reserve. “It may not be the most exotic place on Earth, but it seems we can produce these rare bits of biodiversity.”