Page 82 - The Economist Asia January 2018

66
Science and technology The Economist January 27th 2018
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Genomics track who does what with those data, and
automatically distribute part of any com-
Sequencing the world mercial value that results from such activi-
ties to the country of origin. He calls his
idea the Amazon BankofCodes.
Now, under the auspices of the World
Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Da-
Washington, DC vos, a Swissski resort, these two ideas have
An ambitious effortto map, store and disseminate geneticinformation about much come together. On January 23rd it was an-
oflife on Earth gets underway
nounced that the EBP will help collect the
N NOVEMBER 2015, 23 of biology’s big- past—with the businesses of rubber-tree data to be stored in the code bank. The fo-
Iwigs met up at the Smithsonian Institu- plantations, and of blood-pressure drugs rum, for its part, will drum up support for
tion, in Washington, DC, to plot a grandi- called ACE inhibitors, which are derived the venture among the world’s panjan-
ose scheme. It had been 12 years since the from snake venom—Amazonian organ- drums—and with lucksome dosh as well.
publication of the complete genetic se- isms have helped create industries worth
quence ofHomo sapiens. Otherorganisms’ billions of dollars. Today’s explosion of Branching out
genomeshad been deciphered in the inter- biological knowledge, Mr Castilla felt, por- The EBP’sstated goal isto sequence, within
vening period but the projects doing so tended many more such opportunities. a decade, the genomes of all 1.5m known
had a piecemeal feel to them. Some were For the shift he had in mind to happen, speciesofeukaryotes. These are organisms
predictable one-offs, such as chickens, though, he reasoned that both those who that have proper nuclei in their cells—
honey bees and rice. Some were more am- live in the Amazon basin and those who namely plants, animals, fungi and a range
bitious, such as attempts to sample verte- govern it would have to share in the profits of single-celled organisms called protists.
brate, insect and arachnid biodiversity by of this putative new economy. And one (It will leave it to others to sequence bacte-
looking at representatives of several thou- part of ensuring this happened would be ria and archaea, the groups of organisms
sand genera within these groups, but were to devise a wayto stop a repetition of what without proper nuclei.) The plan is to use
advancing only slowly. What was needed, occurred with rubber and ACE inhibitors— the first three years to decipher, in detail,
the committee concluded, was a project namely, their appropriation by foreign the DNA of a member of each eukaryotic
with the scale and sweep of the original firms, without royalties or tax revenues ac- family. Families are the taxonomic group
Human Genome Project. Its goal, they de- cruingto the locals. above the genus level (foxes, for example,
cided, should be to gather DNA sequences Such thinkingisnotunique to Mr Casti- belong to the genus Vulpes in the family
from specimens of all complex life on lla. An international agreement called the Canidae) and the eukaryotes comprise
Earth. They decided to call it the Earth Bio- Nagoya protocol already gives legal rights roughly 9,300 of them. The subsequent
Genome Project (EBP). to the countryoforigin ofexploited biolog- three years would be devoted to creating
At around the same time as this meet- ical material. Whatisunique, oratleast un- rougher sequences of one species from
ing, a Peruvian entrepreneur living in São usual, about Mr Castilla’s approach, each of the 150,000 or so eukaryotic gen-
Paulo, Brazil, was formulating an auda- though, is that he also understands how era. The remaining species would be se-
cious plan of his own. Juan Carlos Castilla regulations intended to enforce such rights quenced, in less detail still, over the final
Rubio wanted to shift the economy of the can get in the way of the research needed fouryears ofthe project.
Amazon basin away from industries such to turn knowledge into profit. To that end That is an ambitious timetable. The first
as mining, logging and ranching, and to- he has been putting his mind to the ques- part would require deciphering more than
wards one based on exploitingthe region’s tion ofhow to create an open library ofthe eight genomes a day; the second almost
living organisms and the biological infor- Amazon’s biological data (particularly 140; the third, about1,000. Forcomparison,
mation they embody. At least twice in the DNA sequences) in a way that can also the number of eukaryotic genomes se- 1