More than a decade ago, the authors of the once-groundbreaking book Biodiversity Prospecting argued that lifesaving drugs from genetic and biochemical resources, primarily from tropical rainforests, could be a positive force for development and conservation. They dubbed the process “bioprospecting.” Today, many of the flagship bioprospecting endeavors in Latin America—like the lauded INBio project (a result of Merck Pharmaceutical’s partnership with the government of Costa Rica) or the efforts of Shaman Pharmaceuticals—have all but collapsed from view. The INBio project has yet to produce any life-saving drugs, although it continues to receive support from a variety of pharmaceutical and research institutions, and Shaman officially went bankrupt in 2001.
Although bioprospecting has not produced blockbuster drugs or considerable financial windfalls for conservation, it continues apace in Latin America and elsewhere. In less than a decade, bioprospecting has metamorphosed from a sophisticated practice of managing biodiversity to one about managing biodata and creating new markets in biocommerce. Bioprospectors have turned to much more sophisticated efforts to bank biodiversity, in the form of specimens and data—molecular, chemical, genomic, spatial and informatic, to name a few. As social scientist Geoffrey Bowker puts it, “biodiversity panopticons seek to catalogue completely the natural empire” in order to govern it better. Yet, these panopticon-like cataloging projects work more as “oligopticons,” writes Bowker, because they only cover those species and environments deemed commercially valuable.1 As a consequence of these banking endeavors, bioprospecting in Latin America and beyond is helping to catalyze a new financial architecture in biology and, thus, in life as we know it. The extent of this process is poorly understood by the scientists engaged in it, and, with few exceptions, has yet to be examined in any degree of detail by most regulatory agencies.
In 1995, ethnobotanist Michael Balick and economist Robert Mendelsohn broke new ground with their efforts to value undiscovered drugs in tropical rainforests as a means to ameliorate forest destruction.2 Their conclusions provided a potent argument for the claim that local peoples have a strong incentive to conserve rainforests, especially if possible drugs located in the forests were as valuable as projected. What Balick and Mendelsohn did not consider, anticipate or value, however, was the lack of a corresponding incentive for would-be buyers—namely, pharmaceutical capitalists. In practice, few buyers are on hand to purchase “drugs” (i.e., components of biodiversity that might produce valuable drugs) from the forest. The few buyers that are present are often endowed with considerably greater resources, have a powerful incentive and the ability to pit would-be suppliers, such as local, indigenous forest users or even underfunded scientists, in competition with one another in an effort to drive prices to zero, as happened in the case of Shaman. In the 1990s, the company’s demand for sangre de drago, a medicinal plant with alkaloids that are the basis of a few patents, created rampant speculation in local campesino markets in the Ecuadoran Amazon. This is a much-neglected aspect of the political economy of biodiversity—as opposed to the more narrow concern of the economics of plant drug development—and a significant oversight if subsequent conservation schemes are premised on the “inherent value of undiscovered goods” in the forest (or anywhere). Indeed, as it stands, the entire endeavor ignores the crude capitalist means of obtaining those goods.
Moreover, as is the case throughout Latin America, the government’s capacity to monitor, let alone regulate, the emerging “bio-marketplace” is essentially nonexistent. This means that, in the worst-case scenario, illegal measures are deployed to obtain “valuable” plant genes and information—as in the case when researchers from the University of California San Diego conducted collection expeditions in Ecuador without proper permits. High-level sources in Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment told me they speculate that other scientists, notably those from the U.K.-based Xenova/Biodiversity Limited, may have carried out such illegal collections. Even in the best of scenarios, local people trying to enter the nascent bioprospecting market will likely be underserved or overlooked by state regulators. This trajectory reaffirms the claim by Pat Mooney of the ETC Group—a Canada-based NGO concerned with the impact of intellectual property on agriculture and food security—that in an uneven world, all bioprospecting is biopiracy.3
Bioprospecting is an endeavor interwoven with social, political, economic and ecological factors. It is fundamentally a dynamic struggle over access to biological material, or biomatter. Such “biostruggles” involve both contestations over “tangible” materials, like plants, and more fluid conflicts over somewhat ill-defined spatial and knowledge-based resources. Paramount among these latter conflicts are the intellectual know-how that communities and individuals maintain about certain species with “pharmaceutical potential,” the realms in which these materials lie and the subcomponents of these species from the genetic to atomic (or nano) levels and below.
In Ecuador, for example, the legacy of plant hunting and commercialization is extensive, partly because the country, in proportion to its area, may be the most species-rich country in all of South America and, arguably, the world. Approximately the size of the U.S. state of Colorado, Ecuador occupies just under 0.3% of the earth’s landmass, yet some estimates suggest that the country contains more than 20,000 species of flowering plants alone. One factor that contributes to high endemic levels of biodiversity in flora and fauna is that the Andes rise from sea level to more than 6,000 meters, splitting Ecuador into three major biomes: coastal littoral, high sierra and lowland rainforest. The combination of altitudinal effects and latitudinal position are two key features that have given rise to high levels of speciation through time.4
Over the past five centuries, Ecuador’s biogeography has drawn a variety of explorers, naturalists, and others in search of plants and their byproducts. Indeed, the search for valuable or “useful” plants in Ecuador predates the creation of the nation as well as the arrival of the Spanish colonists.5 Indigenous healers, also known as yachacs, made use of much of the flora and fauna for therapeutic, alimentary and a variety of other purposes well before the arrival of Europeans. “Proto-bioprospecting” in what is now Ecuador began with Pizarro’s expedition into the “land of cinnamon” approximately 50 years after the arrival of Columbus in the West Indies.
Then as today, the effects of bioprospecting in general and biocommercialization in particular have not resulted in measurably increased conservation or significant revenue generation on the local level [See “Bioprospecting: The ‘Promise’ and Threat…” p. 27]. Local people have become further enmeshed into occasionally exploitative networks of global capitalists, scientists and social movement actors.
For example, in 1993 the U.S. National Cancer Institute signed a contract with the indigenous Awa Federation of Ecuador stipulating that the Federation would collaborate with botanists from the New York Botanical Garden to collect samples and to arrange for the necessary permits for the export of the materials to the United States.6 In interviews, one of the principle investigators of the project, Hans Beck, characterized the Awa as “collaborators,” noting, “We could not have done our work without them.”7 Beck described the “collaboration”: “I still remember, there was a pregnant woman, probably eight months pregnant, carrying an 80-pound load, same as a 16-year-old, same an eight-year-old,” he recalled. “They each got 5,000 sucres [about $2.50 in 1993]. You know, it was amazing [laughing]. And there was no arguing about [using such workers] because they live in a communal society and that’s how they do their business.”
It appears that scientists, particularly botanists, have rewritten and redefined the practice of science as a consequence of their dependency on capital. The harvesting of chemicals from plants for drug development—like planting bamboo plantations to sequester carbon for sale in emerging financial markets—is now considered firmly within the realm of “science.” But if it’s true that bioprospecting does not and cannot promote conservation—as the Balick-Mendelsohn dream had untenably hoped—then it has thus failed miserably and should cease. But alas, bioprospecting continues. Why? Something else is underway.
The common rhetoric of bioprospecting, in Ecuador and elsewhere, has largely included the scientists’ stated mission to, as Beck told me, “document botanical knowledge” in a “mutually reinforced collaboration”—presumably, with local people, indigenous or otherwise. Yet, in practice, bioprospectors are banking forms of knowledge, materials and especially data for future mortgaging with little to no interest in local collaboration. Xenova/Biodiversity Limited, for example, is steadfastly erecting its “Lead Compound Discovery Project,” set to come online in early 2006, not in cooperation with Ecuador, but with LGC—Europe’s largest, independent analytical laboratory. LGC offers “analytical outsourcing services particularly to the chemical and pharmaceutical markets” and “provides reference materials, cell lines and cultures from the leading international providers to customers throughout Europe.”8
With a similar tack, the ghost of Shaman Pharmaceuticals emerged from the ashes when its founder and many of its senior management reincorporated themselves as Napo Pharmaceuticals in November 2001, less than a year after filing for bankruptcy under the Shaman name. Between the demise of Shaman and the rise of Napo (named after a river in the Ecuadoran Amazon), private investors with newly leveraged capital directly repurchased Shaman’s banked intellectual property, appropriated from Ecuador and around the world, in a sealed-bid auction.9
Meanwhile, in Denmark, work is steadily underway on building a database called the Danish-Biodiversity Information Facility in partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). GBIF’s mission is “facilitating digitisation and global dissemination of primary biodiversity data, so that people from all countries can benefit from the use of the information.”10
In Ecuador, collaborating botanists from local universities and their colleagues at the Ecuadoran National Herbarium (QCNE) are also banking biodiversity into large databases. QCNE sources its data to TROPICOS, “the world’s largest database of plant information, [with] fully web-searchable records for over 900,000 plant names and nearly two million specimens. Over 50,000 plant images are also linked to their records in TROPICOS.”11 This ever-growing database managed by the Missouri Botanical Garden consists of at least 42 interlocked databases composed of plant geo-databases from Bolivia, Chile, China, Ecuador, Madagascar, Nicaragua, North America, Pakistan, Russia and the adjacent states of the former Soviet Union. Missouri Botanical Garden’s work is financed in part by the “life science firm” Monsanto. Likewise, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its research branches maintain numerous databases—some in cooperation with the Missouri Botanical Garden.
The intention of the databases, as stated by the NIH, “is to provide to the public structures, data, tools, programs and other useful information. No access restrictions are placed, and the general public is invited to use this site.” But the description adds, “However, the information is NOT geared toward the general public, and will probably be most useful for researchers working with, or interested in, chemical information, in particular for groups engaged in computer-aided drug design.”12
These expanding databases mark an unofficial announcement of a futures market in biology—specifically, in DNA. Since biodiversity—contrary to the Balick and Mendelsohn theory—has not paid, it is being banked as a kind of foundational capital in a hedge market in biocommercial products and services. Indeed, without a major “hit” or profitable drug developed by bioprospectors, bio-banking helps answer why they are still in operation. This is unlike past banking in which the market potential was poorly understood. The convergence of informatics, biology and nanotechnology means that further banking will create the onset of new markets, as DNA and its substrates become sites of production.
In fact, certain developments hint at a future where DNA and its atomic components, previously banked as an outcome of bioprospecting, stand to become means of production. For example, last May Science@Berkeley Lab Magazine reported, “Berkeley Lab scientists have created the world’s smallest electric motor that may someday power nano-scale devices that walk, crawl, swim, and fly…. The motor measures only 200 nanometers long [a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter], but its power density is 100 million times greater than that of a 225-horsepower V6 engine.”13 Some technological triumphalists see these possible developments as exceptionally promising. Futurist and science fiction novelist Bruce Sterling says enthusiastically, “The business of life is Life-on-Earth Incorporated and Unlimited, a wholly owned subsidiary of deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA].”14 Glenn McGee, a professor of bioethics, goes even further, “A new generation uses biology as software, as part of a world of virtual and not-so-virtual adventures in a realm once reserved for Nature and God.”15
But in an uneven world characterized by widespread global apartheid and environmental racism, the likelihood of an even distribution of the benefits of such technological developments seems as uncertain as the disproportionate concentration of their costs seems certain. And, if anything is clear, such promising pronouncements will not be met without divergent degrees of resistance and engagement across the spectrum of society. As bioprospecting is differentially accepted, the outcomes of what we might call “post-bioprospecting” will also be contested as much as they are accepted.
Notes
1. Geoffrey C. Bowker, “Biodiversity Datadiversity,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 5, October 2000, pp. 643-83.
2. M. Balick and R. Mendelsohn, “The Value of Undiscovered Pharmaceuticals in Tropical Forests,” Economic Botany, Vol. 49, No. 2, 1995, pp. 223-28.
3. Pat Mooney, “Why We Call It Biopiracy?” in Hanne Svarstad and Shivcharn S. Dhillion (eds.), Responding to Bioprospecting: From Biodiversity in the South to Medicines in the North (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag, 2000), pp. 37-44.
4. G. C. Stevens, “The Latitudinal Gradient in Geographical Ranger: How So Many Species Coexist in the Tropics,” The American Naturalist, Vol. 133, No. 2, 1989, pp. 240-256.
5. For a detailed discussion of this history, see Fragoso Ortiz-Crespo, “Monardes and Pre-Chinchonian Knowledge of Cinchona,” Archives of Natural History, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1995, pp. 169-181.
6. National Cancer Institute, “Agreement,” p. 6.
7. Hans Beck, author interview, July 27, 2003.
8. Biotechnology, Inc. Biodiversity Ltd, “Technology,” June 9, 2005, http://www.bdlabs.com/LiscensingTechnology.asp.
9. Sealed bids for Shaman’s “Intellectual Property Portfolio” were conducted with the approval of the United States Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California, submitted June 28, 2001.
10. See: http://www.gbif.org/GBIF_org/bg10#whatdo.
11. See: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/default.asp.
12. See: http://cactus.nci.nih.gov/about.html.
13. Dan Krotz, “A V6 Engine for the Nano-Age,” Science@Berkeley Lab, May 13, 2005, http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2005/May/05-nanoengine.html.
14. Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 5.
15. Glen McGee, Beyond Genetics: Why Your Genes Are Your Most Important Asset (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), p. 3.
About the Author
Dr. Michael K. Dorsey is a professor in environmental studies at Dartmouth College. He has researched the effects and changes on bioprospecting in Latin America since the mid-1990s and is presently completing a volume on biocommerce.
