In 1945, a young chemist called Werner Bergmann was diving off the Florida coast, scouring its waters for undiscovered marine life. One of the species he came across was a rather plain brown sponge. A colleague named the new-found creature Cryptotethia crypta, and Bergmann isolated from it two unknown compounds spongothymidine and spongouridine.
He suspected they could have medical uses, but their true value didn’t become apparent for more than 40 years. In 1987, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first therapy for HIV; that drug, called azidothymidine (AZT), was modelled on the sponge compounds that Bergmann had identified. By 1989, AZT had become the most expensive drug known, at US$8,000 per patient per year, generating more than $100 million a year in profits for the drug company.
Eight other natural marine products have led to clinically approved drugs and another 28 are in clinical trials. Projections suggest that the global marine biotechnology market which includes products for the pharmaceutical, biofuels and chemical industries could reach $6.4 billion by 2025. There’s even a chance that a marine organism could help to combat viruses, such as the one responsible for the current pandemic; a compound isolated from red algae has shown promise in tests on different types of coronavirus (see A. Zumla et al. Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 15, 327347; 2016). Commercial interest in the genetic resources of the high seas has never been greater.
It has also never been more divisive. In the next few months, barring delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, nations are expected to strike a historic deal to protect marine life in the high seas the ocean beyond national governance. This region accounts for 90% of Earth’s available living space, and is thought to be home to millions of undiscovered species.
For the deal to go ahead, nations must agree to a system for creating large marine sanctuaries on the high seas and must lay out rules for how industry operates in these waters. But by far the most contentious issue they will tackle is how to regulate the use of the genetic resources of the high seas both the marine creatures themselves and their gene sequences. The goal is to prevent biopiracy’ attempts by wealthy nations or companies to commercialize biological resources without sharing the benefits with their rightful owners. In the case of the high seas, those owners are all nations.
Researchers are overjoyed by the prospects of a high-seas treaty, but they are worried that efforts to prevent biopiracy will curtail their ability to do basic research in the open ocean.
It’s not an idle concern. Although almost all details of the treaty have yet to be agreed, the draft text includes several ideas that would change how high-seas research happens. Most notable are proposals that scientists would need to notify the United Nations before conducting research cruises in the high seas, or that they would need to obtain permits for such work, which would require them to share data or other benefits from their research.
Most scientists are keen to share benefits with developing nations and Indigenous groups, but they do not favour constraints on research. Some fear that the proposed anti-biopiracy regulations will mirror those of the Convention on Biological Diversity, most notably the Nagoya Protocol, an international agreement adopted in 2010 that restricts scientists’ access to the territories of other nations, including their coastal waters. Nations drafted the Nagoya Protocol to prevent companies from patenting Indigenous medicines without sharing the profits, and now some researchers say it has made it difficult to get permits to work in some developing nations.
I’m delighted that the UN is undertaking this effort as a way of trying to ensure conservation and appropriate oversight of the high seas, says Peter Girguis, an ocean scientist and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Girguis says he is hugely concerned that we’ll find ourselves hindering access for everybody to do academic research.
Conservationists and scientists have pushed for a high-seas treaty for more than a decade, and they are now entering the home stretch. Negotiators were scheduled to start the fourth and final round of talks on 23 March in New York, but that meeting has been postponed until further notice because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The treaty would close a giant gap in the existing network of international and national laws. Countries have exclusive rights to fish and mine in waters up to a distance of 200 nautical miles from their shores. Beyond that are the high seas. Right now, certain activities on the high seas, such as mining and cable laying, are regulated by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, but there is no law to protect marine life in this vast region.
When nations meet to thrash out the treaty, they will have to decide whether the new law to prevent biopiracy covers physical samples only, such as an alga and its DNA or whether it extends to digital sequence information, such as a gene sequence from an alga stored in a data repository.
Nations hope to strike a high-seas deal this year, but there are still deep philosophical divides. Countries such as Russia, the United States and Japan, which have the technological and financial clout to scour the deep sea in search of new drugs, cosmetics and food products, are advocating a free seas’ mentality that favours unrestricted access, patent protection and sharing of non-financial benefits such as data. Developing nations, typified by the Group of African States (the African Group), argue that marine genetic resources are common heritage’ and need some oversight so that their use can be monitored and any profits, as well as other benefits, shared. If there’s almost no form of regulation, there wouldn’t be any opportunities for us to track and trace when there is commercialization, says Michael Kanu, deputy permanent representative to the UN for Sierra Leone, and coordinator of the African Group at the treaty talks.
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