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Learning (And Harvesting) from Extremophiles
kudyadi writes "BBC News has an article on the threat posed to extremophiles by anxious prospectors ready to exploit their unique nature. Potential discoveries include glycoprotein, which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing, and an extract from green algae for use in cosmetic skin treatment, and anti-tumour properties in a strain of yeast. This article explains the issue more lucidly, but in the end, one must consider the environmental ramifications of this biological exploitation before moving ahead full scale. So how is Tux in danger? Let me remind you of a thing called the food chain and then read this."
Is some great white hunter scientist with a cotton swab and a sequencer really going to be a threat to Antarctica?
Let's just stop ALL science until we're absolutely sure of every ramification of every single thing we do. It's a good thing these people weren't in charge in cavemen times; the first man to create fire would have been stoned to death for creating smoke, and the first one to create the wheel would have been burned at the stake for making something that could roll over grass.
Invitrogen patented the harvesting of the polymerase enzyme from the extremophile bacteria thermophiles aquarticus. It's a shame that one company can overcharge researchers by patenting something nature created!
Extremophiles are micro-organisms that grow optimally in some of earth's most hostile environments of temperature (-2C to 15C and 60C to 115C),
Uh.. I'll grant you that -2 celsius is damn extreme. But isn't 15 celsius just about 45 degrees farenheit? I'm pretty sure 45 degrees is fairly comfortable for most people in north america - especially during winter. And a lot of us have to deal with temperates of 10 degrees and under (0 to 3 degrees celsius)...
Yeah. I remember vacuum tube compters. I personally scratch built one. While it's abilities were somewhat limited compared to those of today I'd note that it was functionally superiour to those commonly in use today.
It didn't do much, but it did what it did.
Today's computers are still immature, but complicated enough that they fail regularly in ordinary usage.
In martial arts it isn't the white belt or the black belt who is dangerous. It's the brown belt, who has developed certain skills and possesses real power, but who as yet has no deep understanding or control.
KFG
And "bio-prospecting" is such a loaded term. "Prospector" evokes images of an old, grizzled prospector wearing filthy clothes, leading an overburdened pack mule and "lookin' fer gold in them thar hills." We don't label physicists "particle-prospectors", after all.
Um, what? Food chain, environmental ramifications???
If the submitter had RTFA, he would have read the quote from the co-author:
"We're not saying there's much danger of environmental damage, but it does pose a challenge."
The challenge is simply one of patents and scientific sharing, not the extremist (ironic no?) view described above.
HOw can one describe a potential discovery ? Perhaps you mean potential uses for already known things, or new versions of already known things. The antifreeze protein thing is OOOOLLLD. Also, there is little danger to these organisms: either they are abundant in their natural habitats, in which case harvesting a few for lab use is no problem, or they are rare in their native habitats, in which case they are species that have already lost the evolution lottery
If the exploitation is done by taking a small sample of the organism and then figuring out what compounds it produces that are so useful, and why they're so useful, and then reproducing those compounds and/or effects via an industrial process, that's a fine thing.
Even if the exploitation is done by taking a gene sequence from a creature, throwing it on a plasmid, shoving that into a friendly bacterial culture, and growing the shit in a vat, that's a pretty decent thing.
But if the exploitation is done by harvesting enough of the organism to pose a threat to its continued existence in the wild, then that's something that needs to be stopped (or we may have no more Truffula Trees, for example).
Harvesting a couple of specimens for characterization will not disrupt the antarctic food chain, particularly with the bacterial species. It will just be a matter of creating the appropriate "extreme" habitat/culture conditions, and these organisms can be studied anywhere. There's no way that pfizer or someone else is going to go set up shop down there. Researchers will take a handful of antarctic specimens and study their function elsewhere.
Most of these discoveries end up producing nothing because the original hypothesis was wrong or the end result ended up not making it through the testing process. Each failure is an expensive failure, so you need some way to recover the costs of taking these risks. The only way we know of is to give the agency making the discovery (or more specifically the agency that manages to make something that is actually useful from this original discovery) some porprietary protection so that they can recover enough profit to justify all of the failures.
It is these proprietary interests that allow you to even use a computer, so maybe you should cut them some slack and genuflect in the direction of the USPTO every time you boot your computer. It is not benevolent sharing of knowledge that drove the CPU, disk drive, and RAM manufacturers to invest in the processes and technology that enabled them to produce these products so cheaply.
Greed is good. It provided the comfortable world you enjoy today and continues to provide the environment that makes open source software possible in the first place. The truth can be a bitter pill to swallow, but get over it. The tools and techniques that enable you to prosper are the direct result of proprietary and secret knowledge that recovered its investment and then became open knowledge.
When bioprospectors search tropical areas, the more accepted practice is to partner with the indigenous people so they can benefit from any financial rewards made from the bio-findings. Since Antarctica is property held in common (like the Moon: eh, W.?) by the entire human species, shouldn't any profit sharing go to an international body?
Nature has been creating new drugs for hundreds of millions of years. Why shouldn't we use this valuable resource?
Actually, it's not a question of technology - it's a question of population. Less people, less primary production devoted to feeding people, more undiluted nature.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.