Who wins from nature’s genetic bounty? The billions at stake in a global ‘biopiracy’ battle

Even in the warm summer sun, the stagnant puddles and harsh rock faces of Ribblehead quarry in North Yorkshire feel like an unlikely frontier of the AI industrial revolution. Standing next to a waterfall that bursts out from the fractured rock, Bupe Mwambingu reaches into the green sludge behind the cascade and emerges with fistful of algae.

Balancing precariously on the rocks, the researcher passes the dripping mass to her colleague Emma Bolton, who notes their GPS coordinates and the acidity, temperature and light exposure on a phone app.

“Be careful,” Bolton says to Mwambingu as she wobbles at the edge of the waterfall, and they move on to another part of the former limestone quarry, in search of more grime and gunk.

The pair, who work for the London-based startup Basecamp Research, are harvesting genetic information from organisms lurking in the nooks and crannies of the rocks. Once, scientists looking to develop new products using a rare lichen, microbe or fungus might have had to visit its habitat and gather a sample. Now, the genetic codes derived from these organisms is almost always exchanged digitally, through genetic signatures known as digital sequencing information (DSI).

This exchange is now at the heart of an international battle over who owns the natural world’s genetic data – and who should benefit from the multibillion-dollar discoveries derived from it. In October, world leaders will meet in Cali in Colombia at Cop16, the global biodiversity summit, to try to finalise a world-first agreement on this issue.

Low-income countries – where much of the world’s biodiversity remains – hope it could funnel billions into conserving the rainforests, lakes and oceans where such organisms live.

Examples of what is at stake grow every year. The discovery of the heat-resistant Thermus aquaticus bacterium in the geysers of Yellowstone national park in 1966 became a crucial ingredient for rapidly copying DNA in the polymerase chain reaction process, used in Covid-19 tests. Plastic-eating bacteria could provide a breakthrough for recycling.

Alzheimer’s disease treatments are being created using a drug synthesised from snowdrops, and researchers are looking at whether molecules in chestnut leaves can neutralise drug-resistant bacteria. Bolton’s sister, who has leukaemia, is being treated with a drug derived from a sea sponge.

“Before,” says Bolton, “I would walk around and not really realise how much biodiversity is in every little thing you look at. Now, I want to sample everything.” She and Mwambingu move on to a shallow pool lined with shades of red and yellow, which looks like it could be found at the edge of a volcano. They stop again to take samples.

“There’s so many bacteria and novel species and … really groundbreaking, life-saving applications,” she says.

Access to the digital genetic codes from the microbes gathered in this quarry will be sold to feed voracious artificial intelligence models that are generating potential new drug discoveries, 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 they lead to lucrative commercial discoveries. Scientists working in industry have access to major databases for data on digital biodiversity for free, but the information has often not even been labelled with its country of origin.

The debate over the ethical use of data from nature – and who should profit – is fierce. The natural world has long been the basis of commercial discoveries, particularly in medicine.

But there is growing fury in some countries, which say they have been cut out of the financial benefits of their biodiversity while digital sequencing allows pharmaceutical companies and others to commercialise their flora, fauna and other forms of life without sharing the profits. They accuse those who harvest and monetise genetic information of “biopiracy”. And they propose a solution: a global system governing the exchange of DSI that would compel companies to pay for the genetic information they use.

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Tensions over the issue threatened to spill over into the international biodiversity negotiations in Montreal in 2022, with some nations warning they would quit the talks unless efforts to resolve the issue were made. Finally, countries agreed to create a fund. But the details of how it will actually work are still undecided, and it is set to be among the most divisive issues in Colombia.

The issue is at the heart of long-running tensions in the UN biodiversity negotiations, where countries of the global north have pushed to focus on nature conservation, but many in the global south want to focus on how nature can be sustainably exploited to allow for economic development.

Any agreement faces considerable headwinds. A global system to monitor and distribute the benefits of DSI could cost millions of dollars to establish, 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 goodwill from governments and multinationals.

“The whole question will be around the legality of the Cop decisions,” says Pierre du Plessis, a Namibian negotiator at Cop15 who advises African countries on DSI. “There will be a Cop decision and then after that, it’ll be up to everyone to play nicely and turn it into a resource mobilisation engine for looking after biodiversity.

“Making it more profitable to look after nature than destroying it has always been what’s missing since this UN convention was adopted,” he says. “I am still optimistic that people will see it as the right thing to do.”

For now, the threat that some countries may begin restricting access to DSI hangs over the debate. Sharing the genetic code of Covid-19 was crucial for creating vaccines quickly, and restrictions could hinder future scientific research. Universities, research institutions and companies are also facing growing reputational risks over their use of data.

Related: What is Cop15 and why does it matter for all life on Earth?

In 2019, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a leading genetics lab in Cambridgeshire, was accused of misusing African DNA and told to hand back samples it had collected from Indigenous communities in southern Africa after a whistleblower alleged the DNA information was being used to develop a medical research tool that could have been commercialised.

In the early 2000s, the Kenya Wildlife Service threatened legal action against Genencor and Procter & Gamble, alleging that enzymes obtained from a soda lake in the country were being used in a detergent.

Companies such as Basecamp have been set up to help researchers and companies avoid those disputes. Under Basecamp’s system, the owner of the biodiversity site receives a royalty if it successfully contributes to a commercial discovery – voluntarily putting into practice a similar system to the one it is hoped will be negotiated in Cali.

With its team of data scientists and professional explorers, the company has sampled ice caps in Iceland, under the sea off the coast of Malta and national parks in Malawi, the data from the microbes feeding back into the same hub. It has attracted considerable backing from Silicon Valley over the past three years.

Basecamp has already paid royalties to sites where samples have begun the process to a commercial discovery. Ribblehead, which is run by the Wild Ingleborough nature restoration project, received a modest £250 but that figure is set to grow as the commercial product develops.

“It’s remarkable really,” says Andrew Hinde, a reserve manager at Wild Ingleborough. “It may not be the most exotic location on Earth but we seem to be able to produce these rare bits of biodiversity.”