Who Owns the Ocean’s Genes? Tension on the High Seas
By Olive Heffernan,
Scientific American
| 09. 12. 2022
Tavis Beck on Unsplash
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. The deal faltered in the final hours, mainly over an issue that has long dogged international ocean talks: how to share profits from commercializing the high seas’ genetic resources.
Ocean organisms, both plants and animals, form the basis of numerous successful drugs, including remdesivir, the first treatment approved for COVID, and Halaven, a blockbuster anticancer drug derived from a Japanese sea sponge that has annual sales of more than $300 million. Genetic material from high seas organisms and the digital data from sequencing their genomes could be used to develop new products potentially worth billions of dollars. But who owns these resources, which theoretically belong to the entire world, and who gets to profit from their use? The details of where U.N. negotiators...
Related Articles
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
Now for the...
By Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan, CBC | 04.09.2024
A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out the real dads — and left a trail of shattered lives around the globe, a CBC News investigation has found...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Carey Gillan, UnSpun | 03.18.2024
A Mexican standoff with the United States turned into a Mexican smack-down this month with the release of Mexico’s formal rebuttal to US efforts to overturn limits Mexico has ordered on the use of genetically modified (GM) corn and the...