Then, in October of 2024, at a summit in Calí, Colombia, delegates agreed to establish a voluntary fund. Businesses that profit from biodiversity, such as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, the agreement said, should contribute 1 percent of their profits (or 0.1 percent of their revenue) to the newly established Calí fund, which could raise an estimated $1 billion annually for conservation. Public institutions are exempt and contribute as-yet-undefined non-monetary benefits should they develop products using DSI.
Where some saw an imperfect compromise, other attendees apparently left the talks in disgust. In published reports, for instance, Sajeewa Chamikara, an environmental activist in Sri Lanka, referred to the agreement as “digital colonialism” and “legalized robbery.”
Biopiracy?
Are these concerns about DSI mostly hypothetical? Some say yes; others say no. Textbook cases of physical biopiracy exist, but a clear case of digital biopiracy is harder to come by. As Halewood put it, “It’s not like you can just go and say, ‘Oh, I found this golden gene sequence from the single genome that was put up online and become a biopirate,” Halewood said. “It’s never that simple.”
Even the case of Cow D in New Zealand is not clear cut, and that was exactly the point. Experts that spoke to Undark had a range of perspectives, but many agreed it underscored the complexity and the importance of getting any such policy right.
To some observers, CRISPR seemed like a perfect example, since these tools allow researchers to tinker with genetic sequences found all over the world. But the development of new CRISPR tools usually involves the comparison of many sequences and gene-cutting enzymes and synthetic modifications to the sequence. The resulting patents came about from many sources. Rather than stealing from one country’s well, the process drew from a collective pool.
In 2024, the DSI Scientific Network, an informal group of scientists that formed to advise the CBD negotiations, wrote a case study on another example: the first vaccines against COVID-19. These shots came about because of the digital availability of copies of SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses that cause respiratory illnesses. Within days of researchers publishing the sequence data online, scientists from the pharmaceutical company Moderna made synthetic copies in the lab. The company eventually patented their resulting vaccines, although the patents drew from many sources, involving 176 genetic strains from a large range of countries. As the case study points out, “No single sequence was vital to its work.” As such, the authors suggest the use of DSI is a non-issue and further underscored the idea that use involved far more steps and material than a single copy of sequence. The study concludes there would be no obligations associated with the use of any one sequence from any one country—and likely negligible benefits.
