NEXT week, delegates will gather in Rome to discuss a question that could have profound implications for global biodiversity, food security and public health. Stripped of technical language, it boils down to this: who owns life?
The Rome meeting convenes the governing body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. It is also known as the “seed treaty” because it mostly deals with seed collections. It will address arrangements for accessing these genetic resources, and how to share any benefits resulting from their exploitation. Central to that discussion will be “digital sequence information”.
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The seed treaty covers only samples of the physical material that constitutes plants. But as more species are sequenced and their molecular blueprints digitised, they can be exploited – for creating a drought-resistant crop plant, say – without accessing a physical sample.
It is not just plants at stake. The outcome of the Rome meeting is likely to influence a meeting for the Convention on Biological Diversity next October. This treaty covers all life, and also neglects digital sequences.
Given that an organism’s DNA, RNA or protein sequence is merely information stored in a molecule, you might think that extending these treaties to cover digital sequence information would be uncontentious. Far from it. So far, all attempts to reach a consensus have failed, and some have called the issue ““. Part of the problem is that digital sequence information isn’t clearly defined: should it include only DNA and RNA sequence data, for example, or also amino acid sequences and epigenetic data?
The larger issue is whether including it will further the goals of the treaties, which aim to fairly share the fruits of Earth’s genetic resources. On this, the world is split. On one side are the generally biodiverse and developing countries, which want digital data included to close what they see as a loophole. On the other are the developed countries, which have carried out most of the cataloguing of that biodiversity, and drawn most benefit from it. They don’t want the digital data covered.
Much of the information sits in public databases that researchers can access without obligations towards donor countries. Some in developed nations fear that adding red tape, similar to the agreements that control the sharing of physical samples, will slow crucial research. Because biodiversity loss is a problem, and species can’t be conserved until they have been catalogued, they argue that it will be the developing countries that mainly lose out.
Another area of concern is public health. Containing epidemics and developing new drugs depend on the rapid sharing of pathogen information.
A drug recently shown to be effective against Ebola was made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in the US using digital data derived from a clinical sample taken from a Guinean woman during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and deposited in GenBank. Regeneron isn’t obliged to share the benefits with Guinea because there was no physical sample involved. If the firm had to share, it may have had less incentive to develop the drug and more people might have died in the current Congolese outbreak.
There are potential solutions. Users of digital databases could be required to sign data access and use agreements, which would protect donors’ interests, while leaving research unrestricted until it was commercialised. It is time to discuss these because, while the stand-off endures, more and more biodiverse countries are bringing in restrictive national legislation on access and benefit-sharing, and that is unlikely to help anyone, including them.
