Low-income countries – where much of the world’s biodiversity remains – hope it could funnel billions into conserving the rainforests, lakes and oceans where such organisms live.
Examples of what is at stake grow every year. The discovery of the heat-resistant Thermus aquaticus bacterium in the geysers of Yellowstone national park in 1966 became a crucial ingredient for rapidly copying DNA in the polymerase chain reaction process, used in Covid-19 tests. Plastic-eating bacteria could provide a breakthrough for recycling.
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The debate over the ethical use of data from nature – and who should profit – is fierce. The natural world has long been the basis of commercial discoveries, particularly in medicine.
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In 2019, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a leading genetics lab in Cambridgeshire, was accused of misusing African DNA and told to hand back samples it had collected from Indigenous communities in southern Africa after a whistleblower alleged the DNA information was being used to develop a medical research tool that could have been commercialised.
In the early 2000s, the Kenya Wildlife Service threatened legal action against Genencor and Procter & Gamble, alleging that enzymes obtained from a soda lake in the country were being used in a detergent.
