Unexplainable - Biopiracy

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

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! [e-mail] 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

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, That sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday.

You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news. but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. 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. 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. 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. This is a story about the biodiversity equivalent of a music streaming library. Benji Jones, our biodiversity reporter. 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. The scientific equivalent of going to the store and buying a physical CD. But then scientists got really good.

get at something called genetic sequencing. 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 A's and C's and G's and T's that make up its genetic code. These letters that make it its snakey 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. 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 in a sequence.

People started creating libraries of these genetic codes, these searchable databases. 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 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. 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 And just like music streaming libraries change 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. This is unexplainable. I'm Bird 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. 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. Yeah, so I'd heard that these genetic libraries apparently had helped really fuel the development of COVID vaccines.

And I wanted to learn how. So I reached out to a microbiologist named Deborah Fuller. My research is mostly focused on vaccines and antivirals for infectious diseases. She looked exactly like Madonna, which is neither here nor there, but that is a detail I felt compelled to share. So Deborah took me back to the beginning of the pandemic, which obviously was a horrible time. And this was when the disease we would eventually call COVID was starting to spread. When a new outbreak of a pandemic comes, we don't really quite know. What is it?

Today, it's obvious that COVID is a coronavirus. But in the beginning, scientists needed to figure out questions like, is this thing in 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 Oh, it's a coronavirus. 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. 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.

And after a vaccine was developed, genetic libraries helped kind of keep tabs on the virus over time. Viruses famously evolved very quickly, and again, these databases are essential because they help scientists track how exactly a virus is changing. Oh, here's a new variant.

Let's update the vaccine for Omicron. Go back and get your booster. Oh, here's a new variant. variant, we need to make another updated vaccine. 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. 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? This is the power of having lots and lots and lots of examples of different viruses just a few clicks away. Like, it really is incredible.

It's changed both, like, what we can know and also how quickly we can do science. 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. Medicines, for example, anti-cancer treatments, beer, brewing. Cosmetics. 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. There's just an explosion of all kinds of both basic research and research with practical applications. So really

these sequences are just a part of our everyday life for everybody. Researchers estimate that at least two-thirds 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 microbes secrete a substance that we could use to find a cure.

All of which is very, very exciting. But there is a catch. And I will tell you more about that after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow,

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Go to Virgin Atlantic.com to learn more. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America, actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong?

What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this and I will learn from this. But for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington,

his plans for immigration reform and more. Before the break, we were talking about how these. 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. Yeah, okay. 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 like that. 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. 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 farmer research, say. 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. 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. This is not a new problem. In fact, before you had widespread use of big digital databases of DNA, people were already wrestling with something called biopiracy.

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

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 arm poison darts. Eventually, some U.S. 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 they went in and kind of benefited from, this indigenous knowledge.

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

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

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. 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. It's not just thinking about how many sequences go into something. it's also thinking about what value or role to 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. 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? 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. And in October, the U.N. had a big meeting to try and hammer out an agreement on what to do about these genetic libraries. This thing called COP 16. It's a big biodiversity conference under the United Nations. It's basically like the Paris Agreement, but for nature, if that means anything. 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 Columbia to cover it. And I would say the most important item on the agenda that all these government leaders are trying to hammer out is what do we do about these giant DNA databases? 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. 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. 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. And on the last day, when the country, who are finalizing all their decisions under this conference, they met in an open venue. Okay, so we have done a lot, but today is the definite moment. So Susanna Muhammad, Columbia's Environmental Minister,

who's the president of this of this COP event, was sitting in front of this big room full of delegates from different countries. Distinguished delegates, we have reached the last day of our meetings and only have a few hours remaining to conclude our negotiations. But even after all the negotiating that had already happened, there were still a bunch of unresolved issues. And people from different countries would voice various objections. Because this is something Argentina won't be able to accept.

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. I can't say the word. It's too late in the day. People were getting very loopy. They hadn't slept.

And finally, really early in the morning, after working all night, it seems like they have a compromise. As I don't see a party asking for the floor, so it is a doctor. I mean, you can literally hear her giggling and relief. Everyone seems really happy and mostly just relieved at this point. So what do they agree? Like, what's the agreement? 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. 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. 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. So the money goes into the fund. And this fund will then go towards conserving biodiversity

in countries around the world, but especially in poor 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. 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?

No. Like, first of all, this is very new. A lot of companies are still just processing what this looks like, how they're going to play ball, whether they're going to play ball. The U.S. is not a member of the U.N. convention under which this new agreement falls. So the U.S. isn't really involved in any of this in a formal way. That matters because there are some big pharma and cosmetic and agriculture companies in the United States. This agreement is also not legally binding at all. It's more of a good faith hope that companies will play along.

And then at the end, 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. All that being said, Benji does see potential for something really good to come out of this agreement. 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 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 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. 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, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Meredith Hodnott, who runs the show. Noam Hassanfeld is our host, and he did the music for this episode. Patrick Boyd and Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Anuk Duceau checked our facts, and Mandi 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 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 Unexplanable at Vox.com. 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 slash members. That is vox.com slash members. But also, if you just leave us a nice rating 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 Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we will be back next week.