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Park Service will study how to make bioprospecting pay Making use of medicinally important microbes may be big boon to parks' budgets CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The potential for rich rewards from bioprospecting in the nation's natural treasures has the National Park Service seeing green - as in money. But some conservationists fear greed will interfere with the agency's duty to preserve the national park system. The Park Service plans to study how to cash in on bioprospecting - the search for organisms with valuable medicinal, industrial and other uses - on the land it stewards. The nationwide environmental study with a financial angle was given the go-ahead last month. It will proceed even as a pioneering bioprospecting deal in Yellowstone National Park is held up by a lawsuit, according to Michael Soukup, associate director for natural resources stewardship and science for the Park Service. "We are getting interest from companies that are doing this all over the world," Soukup said. "We expect that we will get more interest and we want to be prepared." A hot-water-loving bacterium called Thermus aquaticus is the Park Service's poster child for what could be at stake. First found in Yellowstone's hot springs in 1966, T. aquaticus eventually provided the key to decoding strands of DNA, the molecular blueprint of every living thing. The T. aquaticus discovery has led to a Nobel Prize and generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a Swiss drug company. None of the money has gone to the national parks. Never again, say Park Service officials. "We wouldn't want to sit on that," Soukup said. "If there are financial returns, we think the American taxpayers are entitled to some percent." Bioprospecting holds promise for a variety of applications. Hot water-loving bacteria, cousins of T. aquaticus and others in Yellowstone, have been put to use making everything from medicine to high fructose corn syrup and stonewashed blue jeans.
Cancer-fighting agents have been found in the Pacific yew tree. And long before the word "bioprospecting" was coined with the implication of big money to be made, penicillin was derived from fungus and aspirin from tree bark. While it will remain illegal to harvest resources from the parks, the best way for the Park Service to encourage a new spirit of research - that motivated by profit - has yet to be determined. Park Service officials particularly want to determine how companies can help protect the very resources that attract their interest. That can be done through sharing profits with the Park Service, the data they collect, or both, according to Soukup. However, there are risks. Most organisms found by bioprospecting are not useful, and, on average, it takes a pharmaceutical company 10 years and $300 million to transform a natural product into a marketable drug. Some say a profitable find could lead to throngs of researchers sampling snippets of plants and dollops of bacterial goo while tourists may not lay claim to so much as a souvenir pine cone. "I think they have mischaracterized it as any other research that has ever happened" in the parks, said Mike Bater, executive director for the Missoula-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies. "It's not. It's big business, it's big money." On Yellowstone's 125th anniversary in 1997, park officials announced a deal to open the park's hot springs to bioprospecting by the San Diego-based Diversa Corp. Diversa agreed to pay $125,000 over five years plus an undisclosed percentage of any profits from research applications. In March, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, the International Center for Technology Assessment, the Edmonds Institute and a Montana resident obtained a court order halting the deal until more study is done in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act. "When you have a commercial entity involved, it adds a host of impacts on the park," said Joseph Mendelsohn, who represented the International Center for Technology Assessment of Washington, D.C., in the lawsuit. While each sample taken by the Diversa researchers would be no larger than a teaspoon or two, no limits were placed on how many samples could be taken, he said. Others say it is fundamentally unethical for corporations to patent living things, or even the chemical processes derived from them. "The issues of patenting life touch on the deepest issues human beings can touch on," said Beth Burroughs of the Edmonds, Wash.-based Edmonds Institute. "I look forward to everyone discussing this." When the study will begin or how long it will take await the decision of Park Service regional directors, he said. Yellowstone could be just the beginning. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Death Valley National Monument and several parks in Alaska are potentially rich grounds for bioprospectors, according to Preston Scott with the World Foundation of Environment and Development. It has orchestrated bioprospecting deals around the world and has been cooperating with Park Service on the issue. "In areas of rich biological diversity or where life forms exist under extreme conditions, either hot or cold - those will be the future bio-mines in terms of the potential of discoveries to be made," said Mark Peterson, Rocky Mountain region director of the National Parks and Conservation Association. "We don't want to give away the store." Copyright 1999 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Associated Press