Biopirates Walk the Plank

A National Geographic project that uses DNA to map humanity's genetic lineage is under fire from indigenous rights groups that are pressing the United Nations to halt the project.

The controversy marks the rising public profile of "biopiracy" -- a word that just entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year and loosely refers to the failure of companies and researchers to pay indigenous groups and poor governments for biological materials and ideas.

As scientists scour rainforest in search of useful things inside living beings, a growing list of developing countries and groups are moving to stop piratical pilferers -- or take a cut in their profits.

The rising biopiracy panic has even tainted companies like Google, which in March was put on the plank for its reported plans to help geneticist -- and accused "biopirate" -- Craig Venter put searchable genes online. Venter's press representative had no comment, and Google's representative said the company had no information to share.

"Biopiracy awareness is undoubtedly growing fast, so much so that you are seeing calls for an international framework to deal with the problem," said Deb Harris, a Northern Paiute activist from Nevada who directs the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism (IPCB).

In March, a U.N. meeting in Brazil heard calls for international laws to stop biopirates and give indigenous groups benefits-sharing plans. Meanwhile, trade lawyers fight over patent laws at the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. And green groups battle free trade deals like the pending agreement between biorich Peru and the United States, which critics say fails to crack down on biopirates.

But some question whether well-meaning biopiracy activists are taking the wrong road, even hindering science and useful projects.

The National Geographic's Genographic project, a nonmedical project that also lets Average Joes buy a $90 testing kit to discover their own genetic heritage, steers proceeds to a fund that helps indigenous groups. But Harris of IPCB says researchers fail to properly inform subjects before they hand over DNA samples. "The project's research protocols show they only spend 20 minutes with the test subjects getting their consent," said Harris, who has assembled hundreds of signatures from indigenous groups and is pressing a U.N. body on indigenous affairs to stop the project.

National Geographic officials are frustrated by the charges and stress that researchers even took the rare step of releasing research protocols in the name of transparency. They point out that the 20-minute window cited in the protocol alludes only to the physical sampling of blood, not the time it takes to inform and get consent, as critics claim.

"It clearly does not include the extensive time taken to make initial contact with indigenous collaborators and representatives, explain the project, receive word of enthusiasm (or not, which is fine) and then spend time setting up the further permissions to visit the region, talk to leaders and individuals whom we have been briefed are already interested, etc., which takes weeks and months," Lucie McNeil, a National Geographic spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

Share the benefits

Many indigenous groups and developing countries are calling for "contractual benefits sharing" whenever corporations make money off "research leads" or materials snatched from native habitats. Some call for new patent rights over seeds, knowledge and other things foreign companies have been known to grab. Still others reject altogether the right to patent life forms.

The crosscurrents make biopiracy, a very real and ecological destructive problem, a vague and confusing buzzword.

One challenge for biopiracy activists is getting America's shrunken attention span around the dull but crucial topic of patent law. Perhaps that's why biopiracy has a sensationalist vibe.