In an engineered world, who benefits from biological diversity?

Outside the conference hall of the Moon Palace, a luxury Cancun resort, warm waves lapped white sands, bathed in a pink Mexican sunset. Inside, close to two hundred delegates to the United Nations’ 2016 biodiversity conference huddled around a doorway, desperate to get into a windowless room for the final evening’s negotiating session. In the end, most of the crowd made it into room, to witness twenty or so country delegates to hammer out compromise text late into the night. This wasn’t what they had expected from a UN summit. But the issue under discussion – synthetic biology – is an unusual topic.

Synthetic biology is often described as the application of engineering principles to biology. Some see it a fundamentally new approach to biology; others as the next stage of biotechnology; and others as simply an exercise in rebranding. As social scientists researching this field, we’ve seen the confusion of synthetic biologists as to why a treaty about biodiversity is attempting to govern their research.

The reason lies in the broad mandate of the UN’s convention on biological diversity (CBD). One of the largest international environmental agreements, the CBD’s three objectives include conservation of biodiversity; sustainable use of biodiversity; and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resources of biodiversity.

In 2010, when Craig Venter’s “creation of synthetic life” was generating headlines around the world, the CBD’s scientific advisory body first engaged with synthetic biology. Since then, the CBD has become the most active international forum on the issue, consistently calling for a precautionary approach and effective risk assessment. Through an on-line forum and a regionally-balanced expert group, it produced an operational definition of synthetic biology and began to consider potential benefits and adverse effects in relation to the CBD’s three objectives.

The latest round of negotiations in Cancun, which ran from 4-17 December 2016, provided the largest stage yet for a rehearsal of the promises and perils of synthetic biology. For the first time, a contingent of researchers and studentsworking in biotechnology and synthetic biology participated as observers. These scientists, alongside delegates from the biotech industry, talked up the prospects of a new industrial revolution, fuelled by engineered microbes to produce fuels, chemicals, medicines, crops, and food ingredients. On the other side of the debate, coalitions of civil society and community groups challenged such optimism, and warned of detrimental impacts on rural livelihoods, and the consequences of engineering nature in the pursuit of profit.

Going into the negotiations, many expected the debate to focus on biosafety, and specifically the development of gene drives. Instead, a row erupted over shifting methods of accessing biodiversity for research and development. Genetic resources from tropical regions have long been a source of new drug and product discovery for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. One of the CBD’s main achievements has been to establish that these genetic resources were not simply there for the taking, and that countries had sovereign rights to them.  

Read more https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2016/dec/22/in-an-engineered-world-who-benefits-from-biological-diversity

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd