Biopiracy and bioprospecting

DEFINITION: Extraction of biological resources from areas of biodiversity

The practice of extracting biological resources from regions of the world known for their great biological diversity, often carried out by scientists working for corporations or educational institutions, is the subject of ongoing debate. Many environmentalists and indigenous peoples see such resource extraction as a form of exploitation.

With the signing of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, participatory nations agreed to no longer consider biological resources the “common heritage of mankind” but conceded the rights to distribute such resources to the individual nations that housed them. Around the same time, the terms “biopiracy” and “bioprospecting” began to be used to describe the acquisition of these newly protected resources. The two terms refer to essentially the same thing, the extraction of biological resources from areas of biodiversity, but they have decidedly different tones, the former having been coined by opponents of such activity and the latter being preferred by the practitioners of this type of resource extraction.

Biological resources include whole organisms such as crops or livestock, chemical compounds that can be purified from specific organisms that produce them, and even the genetic material taken from organisms that can then be used to produce desired proteins, usually in conjunction with some form of genetic engineering. These resources hold value in that they can be used to improve agricultural yields, perform certain industrial processes, or serve various pharmaceutical applications. The debate over the appropriate acquisition of these resources led to the split in the terms used to describe the same activity. “Biopiracy” brings to mind a swashbuckler who pillages resources without regard to the victims; “bioprospecting,” in contrast, conveys the image of a gold miner staking out a claim and then working it, with no guarantee of ultimate success.

Bioprospecting

The image of the gold-rush prospector is perhaps most appropriate for one particular type of resource collection: the biodiversity-driven, or random-collection, approach. Scientists taking this approach sample large amounts of organisms for a desired chemical activity or genetic attribute without prior knowledge of precisely where to look. The screened organisms are typically plants, microorganisms, insects, or marine invertebrates. This is called the biodiversity-driven approach because mass sampling is best done in areas with wide ranges of different organisms living in close proximity.

Just as modern mining methods include scientific means for discovering deposits of minerals, however, bioprospecting often makes use of prior knowledge to narrow the pool of organisms being tested. This knowledge falls into three main categories: chemotaxonomic, ecological, and ethnobotanical/ethnopharmacological. The use ofchemotaxonomic knowledge involves the sampling of organisms that belong to the same taxonomic class as an that is already known to have a desired property. An example would be screening a number of from the class Actinobacteria, the taxonomic group known to be responsible for the production of streptomycin, for properties. Ecological knowledge is knowledge that can be gained from field observations of the interactions between particular organisms. Certain plants and animals, for example, produce chemical compounds called secondary metabolites that they use to defend themselves against predator attack. A scientist taking an ecological approach to bioprospecting may detect such interactions and choose species for further testing based on these observations.

The use of ethnobotanical/ethnopharmacological knowledge is the most controversial approach, as it seeks to capitalize on the medical practices of indigenous peoples who inhabit the areas of interest. Ethnobotanical knowledge focuses on plants that have traditionally been used for healing purposes by indigenous peoples, whereas ethnopharmacological knowledge is broader, encompassing all traditional drugs as well as their biological activities. Using such knowledge, scientists can screen specific organisms for desired properties with a much higher degree of success than is seen with randomly sampled collections.

Biopiracy

Much of the world’s lies in the tropical regions, often in developing countries that have historically experienced oppression by wealthier nations. It is not surprising, therefore, that indigenous peoples in these regions tend to be wary of the academic institutions and multinational corporations that engage in what these entities may view as simple bioprospecting. Often, indigenous peoples have concerns regarding the entire practice of treating biodiversity as a biological resource, including the patenting of living organisms and profiting from biological materials that for many years previously were exchanged freely among those who reaped the benefits. Even if these concerns are allayed, questions often remain about who should be compensated for traditional knowledge that leads to a “discovery,” as well as what would constitute a fair level of compensation.

Although no entity has been prosecuted officially for biopiracy under the Convention on Biological Diversity, many allegations of biopiracy have been made, and a number of planned bioprospecting projects have been abandoned after information about them became public and protests ensued. It may be partially because of such controversies that bioprospecting activities actually decreased in the decades following the convention’s signing, as many companies turned away from using natural resources and instead developed synthetic processes, such as combinatorial chemistry to produce lead compounds that could be screened for a desired activity.

In the 2020s, some advocates of bioprospecting suggested harvesting plants from the wild and cultivating them for study and use in creating new chemical compounds and potentially for developing new food crops. Many researchers point to the practice as a way toward achieving United Nations Sustainability Goals including sustainable agriculture and clean energy.

Bibliography

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