WTF is bioprospecting and WTF do I care?

vial issues

Of late, I’ve been occupied by a paper for my writing seminar on Antarctica (yes, that Antarctica). While originally the piece was to be focused on transhumanism in the Antarctic context (don't ask), its emphasis soon shifted to the notion of bioprospecting. Bioprospecting is the attempt to harvest raw genetic information and indigenous knowledge for commercial processes, a process that is picking up momentum as gene sequencing and biotechnologies continue their exponential improvement. Although the material I’ve thus far encountered has been intriguing, it has also been predominantly focused on places where there are people. While this is very bad for my polar research, it actually makes for an interesting blog post (I hope). Issues of bioprospecting (and its sinister cousin, biopiracy) are of worldwide importance precisely because they tend to involve giant multinational corporations interacting with groups who are often disconnected from the global economy and legal norms. An additional source of complication is the fact that while bioprospectors tend to come from the rich, prosperous global North (the West plus Japan), the biodiversity that draws them tends overwhelmingly to be in the poor, undeveloped global South. The result of this has been a series of fairly egregious transactions, the most notable being Eli Lilly’s outright theft of the Rosy Periwinkle compound from Madagascar natives in the 1950’s (described euphemistically in the article as a time, “ prior to ethics becoming widely recognized as playing a role in business”).The compound went on to be a highly successful cancer treatment, and Madagascar received no compensation. Sadly such dealings have historically been fairly common, and many groups have been unduly cheated out of their national and cultural biological heritages.

At this point, it would be easy to condemn global pharmaceutical companies as monstrous agents of the evil Washington consensus and call for a worldwide ban on bioprospecting. Before we all line up to torch a CVS, however, its important that we consider the other side of the situation. Within an appropriate institutional market framework, bioprospecting can actually achieve many laudable goals. By providing an economic incentive to preserve biodiversity, such activities protect the rainforest and other such climate from being turned into fields or roads. The introduction of high tech businesses potentially allows for technology transfers that could better the lives of the entire population. Finally, such practices allow for the global south to acquire a valuable, renewable resource that could help bring them out of poverty and immiseration. Furthermore pharmaceutical companies would have an incentive to cooperate with such a regime on several levels. The first of these is that the “hit rate” of useful biological molecules is quite low (1 in 100,000), meaning a long term, stable investment climate is needed for such research to take place. In addition, the local knowledge of native groups is invaluable to such efforts, and in some studies raises the odds of finding a hit by fivefold. As a result, the cooperation of the host nation and its people is an invaluable asset in the search for marketable compounds.


with a vial of sufficient size, one could even bioprospect this dog

As such, should an enforceable worldwide set of market norms come into play, bioprospecting could become a global win-win situation. The way to enforce these norms, it seems, is under the auspices of the WTO. Of late, the Doha round of the World Trade Organization broke down in part because the developing world was unwilling to act to protect intellectual property. By framing biodiversity as intellectual property that would be protected, however, the North and West could create a coalition of bio-rich nations who would have a stake in ensuring strong incentives for intellectual property protection worldwide. Such a consensus would change the dynamics of current trade policy debates, and may even help to reweave the fast fraying consensus on global free trade. Ultimately, then, bioprospecting may hold the key not merely to third world development and first world pharmaceuticals, but also to a system of free trade that makes everyone better off.