Prospecting for Profits

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted July 16, 2003.

Yellowstone, the country's first national park, is home to more geysers and hot springs than anywhere else in the world. Now it is seen as a source of what could be described as organic gold. This "gold" would be the microorganisms that live in Yellowstone's unique ecosystems -- like Thermus aquaticus, a heat-loving microbe discovered in the park's Mushroom Pool in 1966.

One of Thermus's enzymes, known as the Taq polymerase, became the key to the polymerase chain reaction technique for manipulating small amounts of genetic material because of its ability to withstand high temperatures. In the 1980s scientist Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for perfecting this technique, which has become a key component of molecular biology, medical research and law enforcement, making possible the practice of DNA fingerprinting.

Since buying the patent for the Taq enzyme for $300 million in 1991, the Swiss drug company Hoffman-LaRoche has earned more than $100 million a year from it. Meanwhile Yellowstone and the National Park Service have gotten not a cent from this windfall.

Over the past six years the cash-strapped park service has been planning to change that, with a plan to allow companies to patent microorganisms found in national parks and develop profit-sharing agreements with the park service for their use.

In 1997, at Yellowstone's 125 birthday celebration, the National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior announced the signing of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the Diversa Corporation, a San Diego-based company specializing in research in hot springs. Under the plan Diversa would pay Yellowstone $100,000 a year to extract biological tissues, sediment, soil, water and rocks from the park and the park would get a small percent of royalties from any products developed from this research. At the time of the Diversa agreement signing Yellowstone also had at least 15 other similar agreements in the works.

To many in the park service and the corporate world the plan seemed like an ideal fit. Because of the small size of microbial samples -- usually an eyedropper or teaspoon of water -- this kind of research was not seen as overly invasive. And it could be a way to generate badly needed funds for the park service.

But opposition to the plan quickly surfaced. Critics noted that while Yellowstone should share in profits derived from its resources, the patenting and royalty process creates the temptation for massive prospecting of microbial resources in our nation's parks. And Yellowstone's charter specifically forbids the commercial use of plants and animals from the park.

"Allowing biotechnology companies to extract natural resources from the parks for profit may affect the ability of the parks to serve their inspirational and expressive functions," says a 1999 article in the Ecology Law Quarterly. "In deciding to enter into the Diversa agreement, the Park Service has framed the question as whether bioprospecting companies should pay for the right to seek their fortunes in the national parks. The real question, however, is whether they should have that right at all."

In 1998 a lawsuit was filed by the Edmonds Institute, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, the International Center for Technology Assessment and Montana resident Phil Knight against the U.S. Department of the Interior alleging that the Diversa agreement violated various federal statutes and environmental protections.

While research at Yellowstone and other parks has continued, as a result of the lawsuit this and other CRADA agreements have been stalled pending an environmental assessment study, expected to be released sometime this year.

Patent Profit

Research in Yellowstone or other national parks is nothing new; Yellowstone's first research permit for the collection of microbial materials was issued in 1898 and hundreds of research permits are granted by the park every year.

But the potential for corporations to patent the results of their research and make massive profits off them appears to be escalating. Already enzymes extracted from the hot springs are used for cleaning industrial machines, making paper and beer and tenderizing meat, among other things. And it has been reported that so far only one percent of the microbes in Yellowstone's hot springs have been discovered.

"As the benefits of biotechnology have become increasingly visible, the demand for bioprospecting has also grown," says the lawsuit. "This increased demand places greater and greater value on places like Yellowstone that have a high level of biodiversity, here greater concentrations of genetic information offer the best chance of discovering biochemical materials that may lead to important (and commercially rewarding) projects."

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