Countries are struggling with how to share genetic code from myriad ocean creatures, which could lead to billion-dollar drugs
After nearly two weeks of recent United Nations negotiations in New York City, countries from around the world failed to finalize an ambitious treaty that would create enormous marine protected areas and enforce stricter rules for industry on the high seas—the two thirds of the ocean beyond any country’s exclusive ocean territory.
Since the 1950s researchers have discovered almost 34,000 marine compounds with commercial potential for a wide variety of uses. An antifreeze protein from a cold-water fish has improved the texture of ice cream, and an enzyme extracted from a microbe along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is being used to develop a biofuel. So far companies have successfully developed more than a dozen drugs from marine organisms found within national waters.
Developing nations, including a group of African countries, have argued that profits, data and other benefits derived from marine genetic resources should be shared among all nations. “This is a whole new enterprise, a grand venture that developing countries have often felt left out of,” says Kristina Gjerde, a senior high-seas policy adviser for the nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature .
Another proposed option would require all U.N. member nations to make up-front payments into a fund. Governments would contribute at a level appropriate to the scale of their respective countries’ marine biotechnology industry. But developing nations saw initial figures proposed in New York as grossly insufficient, according to Henry Novion, an independent consultant who was part of the Brazilian delegation.
DSI is currently unregulated, even within the Nagoya Protocol, which only addresses physical samples. U.N. member states are wary of including DSI in any monetary sharing plan for the high seas because it is virtually impossible to trace the origin of such information once it has been synthesized into a compound that is incorporated into a product. Tracking gets especially complex when a product is designed using genes from different organisms.
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