Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.