Bioprospecting: A Brief History

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Bioprospecting

From Kew Gardens to Merck

   While bioprospecting seems like a relatively new phenomenon, it has existed in many forms since societies began trading with other nations. Colonialist expeditions from Europe in the eighteenth century went to the New World to seek out exotic plant species to bring back to their kingdoms. There were decorative flowers, medicinal herbs, and new food staples to excite the ruling powers of Europe (Schiebinger 2004). These imperialist expeditions were uniformly one-way transfers of knowledge, with the biological explorers extracting knowledge from local ‘primitive’ people of the New World. There was no exchange of knowledge, and certainly no offers to provide self-sufficiency for the communities they were invading. On the contrary, these explorers usually established infrastructure that would benefit their extractive practices. Many of these left lasting influence on the landscape and political development of the communities they were located in, thus facilitating continued biological prospecting trips.     

    One of the most famous bioprospectors, though he certainly wouldn’t have claimed that title, was Sir Joseph Banks, the botanical supplier of Kew Gardens  in England. Kew Gardens had been established in 1772 by joining two royal estates in London, and Banks facilitated its growth as a center for biological knowledge sharing. Of course, this knowledge sharing was only among the elite botanical explorers, not the local people from whom the knowledge and plants originally came from.  Kew Gardens established the political and structural framework for botanical knowledge sharing for much of history (Drayton 2000).  For instance, the East India Company ‘employed botanists to find “drugs and dying materials fit for the European market”, instructing them to find and collect local knowledges and resources and bring them back to Britain and Kew Gardens” (Mackay 1996). 

    Since Kew Gardens, there has been a growing desire to acquire specific knowledge for economic purposes. The development of chemical extracts for medical purposes has been a popular method for garnering corporate and investor support. The forefathers of American history supported botanical expeditions that increased the diversity, and thus the status, of their own farms. Therefore, political support in the US for patent laws that facilitate biological knowledge sharing have existed for a few centuries. The establishment of the US Patent Office made this even easier, since it was justified to help develop the nation’s agricultural self-sufficiency. Since the mid 1800’s, the Patent Office supported agricultural and botanical patents, which in the end led to the growth of the pharmaceutical industry. By distributing seeds institutionally to private interests, gardens such as the New York Botanical Garden started collecting species for research purposes (Scholz 221).  The gradual progression of entrepreneurial research and garden collection spurred the corporate interest in researching chemical extracts from plants in places like Latin America and Africa. 

    By the 1930’s, the corporation now known as Merck, was collecting samples in Latin America, which led them to develop the well-known compound quinine. After many companies started practices such as these, the Cornell University professor Thomas Eisner coined the term 'bioprospecting' in 1989. He describes it as, "The systematic search for secondary metabolites with potentially therapeutic properties as a strategy for creating economic incentives for conserving biological diversity" (Eisner 1989). In other words, bioprospecting today is undertood as a two-way process that both searches for medical products in biologically diverse regions, and promotes conservation through economic incentives.

       

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