Page 83 - The Economist Asia January 2018

The Economist January 27th 2018
2 quenced so far is about 2,500. It is not, thus tapped was subsequently used. If Ethnomusicology Science and technology 67
though, the amount of sequencing in- such use was commercial, a payment
volved that is the daunting part ofthe task. would be transferred automatically to the Beyond Babel
That is simply a question of buying designated owners of the downloaded
enough sequencing machines and hiring data. Mr Castilla hopes for a proof-of-prin-
enough technicians to run them. Rather, ciple demonstration of his platform to be
what is likely to slow things down is the ready within a few months.
gatheringofthe samples to be sequenced. In theory, smart contracts of this sort Musicmaybe the food oflove, but
For the sequencing, Harris Lewin, a ge- would give governments wary of bio-
nomicist at the University of California, piracypeace ofmind, while also encourag- oddly, is notthe language ofit
Davis, who was one of the EBP’s founding ing people to experiment with the data. HERE words fail, music speaks.”
spirits, estimates that extracting decent- And genomic data are, in Mr Castilla’s vi- “W Though these words, from the pen
quality genetic data from a previously un- sion, just the start. He sees the Amazon of Hans Christian Andersen, are an ap-
examined species will require between Bank of Codes eventually encompassing pealingnotion, the idea thatthere might be
$40,000 and $60,000 for labour, reagents all manner of biological compounds— universals in music which transcend cul-
and amortised machine costs. The high- snake venoms of the sort used to create tural boundaries has generally been met
grade family-level part of the project will ACE inhibitors, for example—or even be- with scepticism by scholars workingin the
thus clockin at about $500m. havioural characteristics like the conges- field. That scepticism may, however, be un-
Big sequencing centres like BGI in Chi- tion-free movement of army-ant colonies, warranted, for research published in Cur-
na, the Rockefeller University’s Genomic which has inspired algorithms for co-ordi- rentBiologythisweekbySamuel Mehrand
Resource Centre in America, and the Sang- nating fleets of self-driving cars. His even- Manvir Singh of Harvard University pro-
er Institute in Britain, as well as a host of tual goal is to venture beyond the Amazon videsevidence thatmusicdoesindeed per-
smaller operations, are all eager for their itself, and combine his planned repository mitthe communication ofsimple ideas be-
share ofthispot. Forthe later, cruder, stages with similar ones in other parts of the tween people even when they have no
of the project Complete Genomics, a Cali- world, creatingan Earth BankofCodes. language in common.
fornian startup boughtbyBGI, thinksit can Plenty needs to go right for this endeav- To ascertain this, the two researchers re-
bring the cost of a rough-and-ready se- our to succeed, concedes Dominic Waugh- cruited 750 online volunteers from 60
quence down to $100. A hand-held se- ray, who oversees public-private partner- countries. They played these volunteers 36
quencer made by Oxford Nanopore, a Brit- shipsatthe World EconomicForum. Those musical excerpts, each 14 secondslong, and
ish company, may be able to match that working on different species must agree each drawn at random from one of 118
and also make the technology portable. common genome-quality standards. Peo- songs in a collection of the music of small-
The truly daunting part of the project is ple need to be enticed to study hitherto ne- scale societiesaround the world. Given the
the taskofassembling the necessary speci- glected organisms. Countries which share broad range ofcultures and languages rep-
mens. Some of them, perhaps 500,000 biological resources (the Amazon basin, resented in the collection, and the ethnic
species, maycome from botanical gardens, for example, is split between nine states) diversity of the volunteers, Dr Mehr and
zoos or places like the Smithsonian (the should ideally co-operate on common re- Mr Singh could be reasonably certain that
herbarium of which boasts 5m items, rep- positories. And governments must resist those listening were both unfamiliar with
resenting around 300,000 species). The lobbying from vested interests in the ex- the music and unable to understand the
rest must be collected from the field. Dr Le- tractive industries, keen to preserve access lyrics in question.
win hopesthe projectwill spurinnovation to land, minerals or timber, which Mr Cas- After each excerpt had been played,
in collection and processing. This could in- tilla’s scheme aims ultimately to curtail. volunteers were asked what they thought
volve technology both high (autonomous As to the money, that is the reason for the song’s function was, and how sure
drones) and low (enlisting legions of sam- the announcement at Davos. By splashing they were of that on a scale of one to six.
ple-hunting citizen scientists). It does, the tie-up between the EBP and the code The possibilities offered were: “for danc- 1
though, sound like a multi-decade effort. bankin frontofmanyofthe world’srichest
It is also an effort in danger of running people, those behind the two enterprises
into the Nagoya protocol. Permission will are not so discreetly waving their collect-
have to be sought from every government ing tins. The EBP has already been prom-
whose territory is sampled. That will be a ised $100m of the $500m required for its
bureaucratic nightmare. Indeed, John firstphase. The code bank, meanwhile, has
Kress of the Smithsonian, another of the piqued the interest of the Brazilian and
EBP’s founders, says many previous se- Peruvian governments.
quencing ventures have foundered on the For the participants, the rewards ofsuc-
rock of such permission. And that is why cess would differ. Dr Lewin, Dr Kress and
those runningthe EBPare so keen to recruit their compadres would, if the EBP suc-
MrCastilla and his code bank. ceeds, be able to use the evolutionary con-
nections between genomes to devise a de-
Banking on it finitive version of the tree of eukaryotic
The idea ofthe code bankisto build a data- life. That would offer biologists what the
base of biological information using a periodic table offers chemists, namely a
blockchain. Though blockchains are best clear framework within which to operate.
known as the technology that underpins MrCastilla, forhispart, would have rewrit-
bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, they ten the rules of international trade by
have other uses. In particular, they can be bringing the raw material of biotechnolo-
employed to create “smart contracts” that gy into an orderly pattern ofownership. If,
monitor and execute themselves. To ob- asmanysuspect, biologyprovesto be to fu-
tain access to Mr Castilla’s code bank ture industries what physics and chemis-
would mean entering into such a contract, try have been to industries past, that
which would track how the knowledge would be a feat oflastingvalue. 7 A lullaby in any language