Biopiracy

Genetic libraries are treasure troves of information about life from around the world. They’re helping researchers develop everything from vaccines to crops to cosmetics. But who actually benefits from the discoveries scientists make using all this DNA and RNA? Guests: Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox’s Future Perfect; Deborah Fuller, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 02

  If you wanted to listen to a song on demand in the 90s, you kind of had to go out to a record store, buy a CD or a cassette or whatever, and then play the song off of that.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  But then, everything changed, right? Now you have music streaming libraries like Apple Music and Spotify that make it possible to hear not just the songs on one CD,

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  but literally thousands of songs, hundreds of thousands of songs, millions of songs. And these music streaming libraries changed how artists make money, how listeners listen. Honestly, they've kind of changed music itself. But this isn't really a story about music streaming libraries.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  This is a story about the biodiversity equivalent of a music streaming library.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Benji Jones, our biodiversity reporter.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  So a few decades ago, if you were a scientist and you wanted to research something like a plant or an animal or a microbe, you usually would need a physical sample of that thing. So someone who does research on snakes, say, would travel to places like Australia or Brazil to collect snake samples so they could then study them.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  The scientific equivalent of going to the store and buying a physical CD.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  But then scientists got really good at something called genetic sequencing.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Genetic sequencing is when you take a plant, or an animal, or a fungus, whatever, and you extract its genetic information. So you boil down a snake, for example, into the string of As and Cs and Gs and Ts that make up its genetic code. These letters that make it its snaky self. And then that genetic code is a really useful tool for scientists who are doing research. It's not like a total replacement for a physical sample, but you can learn a lot from it.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  And unlike a physical sample, you can actually upload it online and then share it with a bunch of people because it's just a ton of letters and a sequence.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  People started creating libraries of these genetic codes, these searchable databases.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  And so you have researchers who are traveling all around the world, collecting sponges and snakes and birds and insects. And they'll sequence their genetic codes and then upload that information into these libraries of genes, along with like smaller things like fungi and bacteria and whatever. So what that means is that all of this DNA of so many creatures around the world is just online, in databases, and free to access for really anyone.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  And that's why, Benji was saying, it's like a music streaming library, right? Because people can basically search through and download all this genetic information at will.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  And just like music streaming libraries changed the game in music, these open-access genetic libraries are changing the game in science as well. And in some ways, that changes for the better, but in other ways, it could actually be making things way more complicated.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  So, this is Unexplainable. I'm Brad Pinkerton, and today, Benji tells us how these genetic libraries are changing science, and why they're raising some uncomfortable and difficult-to-answer questions.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  So first of all, why is it so useful to be able to download a bunch of genetic information at will? Right? Like, why does this change the game at all? When I dug in to the ways that these libraries are changing science, I actually got a little overwhelmed because like conservationists are using them to come up with new ways to keep tabs on ecosystems. Microbiologists are using them to explore what seems to be like a new branch on the tree of life. There is a lot out there. And so to really showcase how helpful these libraries can be, Benji focused in on one concrete example.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'd heard that these genetic libraries apparently had helped like really fuel the development of COVID vaccines. And I wanted to learn how. So I reached out to a microbiologist named Deborah Fuller.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  My research is mostly focused on vaccines and antivirals for infectious diseases.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  She looked exactly like Madonna, which is neither here nor there, but that is a detail I felt compelled to share.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  So Deborah took me back to the beginning of the pandemic, which obviously was a horrible time. And this is when the disease we would eventually call COVID was starting to spread.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  When a new outbreak of a pandemic comes, we don't really quite know what is it.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Today, it's obvious that COVID is a coronavirus. But in the beginning, scientists needed to figure out questions like, is this thing an influenza? Is it a type of coronavirus? Or is it something totally different? And this is the first place Deb told me that a genetic library can come in really handy. And that's because it gave researchers easy access to all the genetic information for lots and lots and lots of coronaviruses and flu viruses. So they could basically take this new pathogen and compare it to other pathogens in the database to see what it looked most like and come to find.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a coronavirus.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Once scientists figured out what kind of virus was sweeping the globe, they could then try and develop a vaccine against that virus. And so you might remember that the COVID vaccine was developed really quickly. There were a lot of reasons for that, but genetic libraries played a role here. In the patent that Moderna filed for the vaccine, they said that they drew on the genetic information of nearly 200 different respiratory viruses to develop their final product here.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  And that's the kind of thing that you can do when lots of respiratory viruses have already been uploaded to databases that are easily searchable.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  And after a vaccine was developed, genetic libraries helped kind of keep tabs on the virus over time.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Viruses famously evolve very quickly. And again, these databases are essential because they help scientists track how exactly a virus is changing.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Oh, here's a new variant.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Let's update the vaccine for Omicron.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Go back and get your booster. Oh, here's a new variant. We need to make another updated vaccine.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And beyond just sort of individual COVID vaccines, these genetic libraries are also being used for more ambitious vaccine projects. These projects to develop universal vaccines for stuff like coronavirus, but also the flu.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  So they're basically going into these databases. They're analyzing lots and lots of different examples of something like a flu virus to see what all those sequences have in common. Like when you take away all the mutations and the variations, what makes this virus a virus? And can we train our bodies to recognize not just one very specific version of this virus, like the Omicron variant in the case of COVID or the Delta variant, but like every version of it? So that just getting one vaccine would prevent you from getting infected by anything that falls under the umbrella of COVID or the flu?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  This is the power of having lots and lots and lots of examples of different viruses just a few clicks away.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Like, it really is incredible. It's changed both like what we can know and also how quickly we can do science.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And again, it's not just viruses, right? There are researchers all over the world drawing on these genetic libraries, making comparisons, studying DNA and RNA, and developing things to hopefully help people.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Medicines, for example, anti-cancer treatments, beer brewing.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Cosmetics.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Better crops and livestock. Like, we can actually identify traits such as drought resistance in these libraries and use that to breed more drought-tolerant crops.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  There's just an explosion of all kinds of both basic research and research with practical applications.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  So really, these sequences are just a part of our everyday life for everybody.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Researchers estimate that at least 2/3 of cancer drugs in use today are rooted in natural organisms. Like, that is a huge number, and it plays into this idea that's pretty common in biodiversity circles, which is that the cure for cancer is potentially hiding in the Amazon rainforest. And that's because places like the Amazon just have an incredible biodiversity that we have barely even studied. And I don't know, maybe some plant there defends itself in a way that we could learn from, or some microbe secretes a substance that we could use to find a cure.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  All of which is very, very exciting. But there is a catch.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  And I will tell you more about that after the break.

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• 14:10Speaker 02

  So before the break, we were talking about how these genetic libraries could help researchers make really incredible discoveries. Basically, they're libraries, but also treasure chests, kind of brimming over with potential scientific gems. And while that sounds amazing, there is a bit of a problem here.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, OK. So if you think about it, the more stuff that you have in these libraries, the better they are, right? The more examples of snakes and birds and viruses and mushrooms and mold, whatever else you have to work from, the more likely it is that you'll have an organism that might be able to help you make some kind of discovery. Like, these libraries benefit from an abundance of biodiversity, of sequences. The problem is that some countries have more biodiversity than others.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Some countries just have richer ecosystems, like rainforests, for example, that just have more diversity of life to offer. Unfortunately, those countries are not always as rich in money as they are in biodiversity. So there are some rich countries out there that have lots of biodiversity. That's great. But there are also countries that have lots of biodiversity but don't have as many big companies doing pharma research, say.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  And that means that those countries aren't necessarily going to reap the rewards from this genetic treasure chest of data as much, right? They're not going to benefit as much from the various gems that get pulled out by foreign scientists.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  So if we stick with the Amazon example I gave you before, there's a world where the DNA that unlocks a wonder drug comes from the Amazon, but the people who actually live in certain regions of the Amazon don't get to profit off of that drug or even have easy access to it.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  This is not a new problem. In fact, before you had widespread use of big digital databases of DNA,

• 16:04Speaker 03

  people were already wrestling with something called biopiracy.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Biopiracy.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  So essentially, what that is, is when you have corporations or scientists from wealthier parts of the world, so often in North America, Europe, going to poorer countries, often in the global south, so below the equator, Central Africa, South America, and taking samples of wildlife, of plants, and then turning them into commercial products, often patenting those products, and then making a lot of money from them and not sharing those benefits so that money, the access to those drugs, back with the communities that those genetic resources, as they're called, come from initially.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  There are examples of this happening across the last century or so, like curare. It is this group of toxins that is extracted from plants in the Amazon region. And these toxins can cause paralysis.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Indigenous groups in the Amazon would boil these plants. It would release the toxins into liquid, and then they'd use that liquid to actually, like, arm poison darts.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Eventually, some US companies realized that these toxins could be useful in medicine and surgery, that they could, for example, cause a temporary localized paralysis. And so one company developed a muscle relaxant as a result, which means that they went in and kind of benefited from this indigenous knowledge.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  And that's why something like this is called biopiracy. It's people coming in and pirating ideas or knowledge or resources.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  And it's actually such a known problem that in the 1990s and then again in the 2010s, the UN actually tried to fix it.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  They came up with a system where if a researcher from one country wants to take some biodiversity from another country, they should, at least theoretically, find a way to share the benefits of their research.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  So if you are a company that wants to extract plants from, I don't know, South Africa or Colombia, you might have to then sign an agreement with the government of that country that stipulates that you have to give something in return.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  That could be a share of the profits from whatever you develop, but it could also be access to whatever you develop, if it's a drug, say, or it could be helping people in the country that the biodiversity comes from build labs so they can do their own research.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  But the key here is that countries are allowed to regulate access to their own resources, essentially.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Benji told me that even before all these genetic libraries, this system already had flaws. He could not find a lot of great examples of this kind of benefit sharing actually happening in the real world. But now, with genetic libraries, the system has an even more fundamental problem, right? Because it assumes this world where if someone wants to get DNA from an Amazonian microbe, they probably have to go to the Amazon to get that microbe or have some microbes sent to them.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Now we also have this digital option where you have all this DNA and these databases that anyone can access. And so you can literally just get on your computer, type in a few things, and then harvest all this incredible biodiversity data, like the data of life on Earth, without ever leaving home, without having to cross borders or customs checkpoints. And it is really just throwing this whole system of benefit sharing for a loop.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  And even if you wanted to make some kind of benefit sharing arrangement for every single genetic sequence you use from one of these libraries, Benji says it could be kind of hard to do that accounting.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  It's not just thinking about how many sequences go into something, it's also thinking about what value or role do each of those sequences serve. So when you're trying to share benefits kind of equally based on where the sequences are coming from, like you did with the physical samples before, like we were talking about, it gets really complicated really quickly.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Which means that we're stuck with the conundrum, right? On the one hand, we don't want to repeat this history of rich countries going in and pirating the knowledge and resources of other countries. We'd like to make that situation more fair. But on the other hand, these libraries of genetic information, these very useful tools that could help us in a lot of ways, they've made the process of trying to make everything more fair pretty complicated. So what do we do here?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is a question that a lot of very smart people have been trying to answer over the last several years, I guess.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And in October, the UN had a big meeting to try and hammer out an agreement on what to do about these genetic libraries, this thing called COP16.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  It's a big biodiversity conference under the United Nations. It's basically like the Paris Agreement, but for nature, if that means anything.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  If it doesn't mean anything, you can think of this basically as a bunch of representatives from countries all around the world, all gathering in one place to talk about big biodiversity and environmental issues. So Benji ended up going down to Colombia to cover it.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  And I would say the most important item on the agenda that all of these government leaders are trying to hammer out is what do we do about these giant DNA databases?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  This conference lasted for days. And so Benji was wandering around, talking to people, and he was hearing from scientists who didn't want to lose access to these libraries because it would affect their research. He was also talking to representatives from developing countries that are home to some of the biodiversity that makes these libraries so rich.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  They're arguing for things like, we want more accountability in these databases. We want to make sure that it's clear who's using the genetic sequence information and that we benefit in some way from that use.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  But questions like, who exactly should benefit, or how that would even be enforced, that's what representatives from countries all around the world were negotiating at this conference.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  And on the last day, when the countries were finalizing all their decisions under this conference, they met in an open venue.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  Okay, so we have done a lot, but today is the definite moment.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  So Susanna Muhammed, Colombia's environmental minister, who's the president of this COP event, was sitting in front of this big room full of delegates from different countries.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  Distinguished delegates, we have reached the last day of our meetings and only have a few hours remaining to conclude our negotiations.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  But even after all the negotiating that had already happened, there were still a bunch of unresolved issues.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  And people from different countries would voice various objections.

• 23:03Speaker 07

  Because this is something Argentina won't be able to accept.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  They'd haggle over clauses of sentences, and the discussions went on and on for literally hours. Thank you, Madam President. Parties have come a long way towards operation. Ah, can't say the word. It's too late in the day. People were getting very loopy. They hadn't slept. Operation. Ah, operating. And finally, really early in the morning, after working all night, it seems like they have a compromise.

• 23:34Speaker 06

  As I don't see a party asking for the floor, so it is out.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  I mean, you can literally hear her giggling in relief. Like, everyone seems really happy and mostly just relieved at this point.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  So what? What do they agree? Like, what's the agreement?

• 23:57Speaker 03

  So the agreement basically says that if you are a large company in a sector that uses genetic sequences, so uses sequences of DNA and of RNA, then you should pay into a fund.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  In this model, big companies that rely on this digital genetic information. They wouldn't like pay a dollar every time they download some microbes DNA, right? They wouldn't have to look up where did this DNA come from and then pay the country directly. Instead, they would pay a small percentage of their profits or their revenue into this big fund.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  And the reason why this is the kind of final agreement is that it's just much simpler. It doesn't take as much time, planning, energy to create a system to track individual products on the market to the actual sequences in a database.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  So the money goes into the fund.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  And this fund will then go towards conserving biodiversity in countries around the world, but especially in poorer countries that have a lot of biodiversity. So think of Central Africa, parts of South America, Southeast Asia, and also a large portion of that money contributed by those companies that use these sequences will go towards indigenous communities.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  So basically, after a lot of debate, the answer that these countries could agree on for the question of how do we make these genetic libraries fair was make big companies pay some money and then give that money back to different countries and communities that are stewards of a lot of biodiversity. Is this a perfect answer?

• 25:42Speaker 03

  No. Like, first of all, this is very new. A lot of companies are still just like processing what this looks like, how they're gonna play ball, whether they're gonna play ball. The US is not a member of the UN convention under which this new agreement falls. So the US isn't really involved in any of this in a formal way.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  That matters because there are some big pharma and cosmetic and agriculture companies in the United States.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  This agreement is also not legally binding at all.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  It's more of a good faith hope that companies will play along.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  And then at the end, like, there's still some country advocates that told me that they still have issues with how this shaped up. They described this as just another version of biopiracy, that by having this kind of blanket system where you have companies sort of voluntarily paying in, it doesn't do enough to ensure that countries have control over their sovereign resources, over the sequences that come from their plants and animals.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  All that being said, Benji does see potential for something really good to come out of this agreement.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  We still haven't resolved all the questions that these libraries of the world's diversity raise, but I also think that it's an important acknowledgement of the value of nature. Like, we have been relying on plants and animals and microbes and their DNA for decades, for centuries, and they make our lives better. So we have medicines. We have better foods that can survive climate change. Like, so many benefits come from nature, and this fund acknowledges those benefits and then tries to give some money back to protecting them. And I think that, like, right now, most money for conservation, most money for protecting forests, for protecting plants and animals, comes from public government spending. There is a massive deficit when you look at

• 27:41Speaker 03

  what needs to be done to conserve nature. There's a $700 billion, at least, gap in funding for conservation. Governments are going to have to pony up a lot more money, but there's pretty broad consensus among environmental leaders that the corporate sector, the private sector, is also going to need to pay for some of this. How do you get the corporate sector to do something? This is one of those ways. And so I think that, like, this is a turning point in thinking through, how do we drive more money into the environment, into the environmental movement? That ultimately is a big win for nature.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  That was Benji Jones, Vox's biodiversity reporter. If you want to read more about digital sequences and genetic libraries and the debates around them, I really recommend his piece on our site, and we will link that in the transcript. This episode was produced by me, Byrd Pinkerton. It was edited by Meredith Hodnot, who runs the show. Noam Hassenfeld is our host, and he did the music for this episode. Patrick Boyd and Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Anouk Dusso checked our facts, and Manding Nguyen is the fact that some birds can mimic car alarms and also camera shutters. Thanks also to Paige Vega for her help on this one, and we are always, always grateful

• 29:07Speaker 02

  to Brian Resnick for co-founding the show. I love making this show a lot. I get excited to talk about science with people. And if you would like to talk about science with us, please write in. Write in with thoughts about this episode, or thoughts about episodes we could or should do. Write in about the science that you care about. We are at [email protected]. And if you want to support the show and help us keep making it, I cannot tell you how much we would appreciate it if you would join our membership program today. It is at vox.com/members. It is vox.com/members. But also, if you just leave us a nice rating,

• 29:49Speaker 02

  or a review, or tell your friends to listen, tell your families to listen, that also really helps. No matter what, thank you for listening, and Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we will be back next week.

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