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HomeNumeriAnno XXVI, n. 25 (1)Ermenautica. Per un’antropologia ...Mining the Ocean Genome: Global B...

Ermenautica. Per un’antropologia dei mari

Mining the Ocean Genome: Global Bioprospecting Expeditions and Genomic Extractivism on the Oceanic Frontier

L’estrazione del genoma oceanico: spedizioni di bioprospecting, navigazioni tecnoscientifiche, e nuovi immaginari marittimi
Amedeo Policante e Erica Borg

Abstract

L'articolo traccia la trasformazione della genomica in un'industria dedicata all’estrazione, astrazione e manipolazione di materiale genetico e si sofferma sui nuovi tipi di esplorazione oceanica che quest’industria presuppone e promuove. Ci soffermiamo in particolare sulla storia recente delle spedizioni scientifiche di bioprospezione in alto mare, concentrando la nostra attenzione sulle vicende della Sorcerer II e della Tara Oceans, ed evidenziando l’avvento dell’ocean genome come oggetto di studio e target estrattivo. Infine, l’articolo interpreta la mobilità delle navi scientifiche impiegate nel campionamento genomico e meta-genomico come una praxis nautica sui generis: una forma di navigazione estrattiva che sta già generando nuovi usi degli spazi marini, nuove strategie di accumulazione e nuove rappresentazioni degli spazi oceanici. Le pratiche di bioprospezione oceanica stimolano nuovi modi di pensare, esperienziare ed estrarre valore dalle profondità marine.

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  • 1 This research was supported by the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA –FCSH and by the Associa (...)

1The enclosure of the commons is arguably one of the core dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, fuelling ever-new forms of what David Harvey has called «accumulation-by-dispossession» (2003: 1-12)1. As an increasingly rich research literature has shown, the commons can be enclosed and privatized through a variety of processes: from land-grabs to the issuing of monopoly rights over forest harvesting (Ince 2014), the creation of mining enclosures (Perreault 2013), and the imposition of monopolies on the products of the collective imagination through patents and copyrights (Prudham 2007). The present article focuses specifically on processes of extraction, abstraction and enclosure of genetic materials. If we consider the history of genomics from the early 1990s until today, we are confronted with a process by which a number of corporations have proceeded to claim exclusive ownership over isolated ‘genetic sequences’ that often have no immediate ‘use-value’, but that possess a ‘speculative exchange value’ – ‘a speculative exchange value’ that derives from the promise that future biotechnological discoveries may render them useful. The article focuses on a particular subset of these processes of ‘primitive accumulation by patenting’ looking at how marine bioprospecting contributes to capital accumulation by enclosing and privatizing the ‘ocean genome’. It charts the ongoing transformation of genomic science into an industry and considers the new types of oceanic exploration that this genomic research both presupposes and fosters. Ocean biodiversity has become a promising source of genetic materials, which are increasingly targeted by purposefully fitted research vessels from around the world.

2In order to chart the historical trajectory that led to this new age of oceanographic expeditions in search of prized deoxyribonucleic acids, we begin by analyzing the origins of the neoliberal legal and political framework that underpins bioprospecting expeditions and, more generally, the genomic industry. A juridical and discursive shift, originating in the US of the 1980s, and then replicated around the world through international trade agreements, reconfigured isolated DNA sequences and genetically-engineered organisms as patentable ‘objects of manufacture’. This transition provided the financial incentives that sparked a new age of genomic explorations aimed at extracting biological wealth from a variety of global sites – from mountain highlands to the depths of the ocean. This process of gene-grabbing has supported the creation of novel value-chains based on the industrial production of valorizable genomic data. Through patenting, genomic biotechnologies have been turned into a powerful machinery for the accumulation of private property: a transformation that dovetails with a general assetization of the global economy and the emergence of a rentier capitalism underpinned by monopolistic, rent-yielding assets (Christophers 2022: 1-36). We ask: What politico-economic tendencies have led to the rapid growth of bioprospecting expeditions since the early 1990s? How is the genomic data collected during bioprospecting expeditions valorized in the biotech sector and in global commodity chains? How did international regulations mediate between: a long-standing conception of the global genome as a ‘commons’; corporate demands for more patenting opportunities on isolated and engineered DNA; and the attempt by many countries to affirm sovereignty over the genome contained in the living cells of the organisms residing in their controlled territories?

3In the second and third parts, we focus our analysis on the recent history of genomic bioprospecting operations in the global ocean by looking at two large-scale scientific voyages: the Sorcerer II expedition (2003-2006) and the Tara Oceans expedition (2009-2013). In the emergent biopolitical economy, the global ocean presents itself as an immense accumulation of biological assets – a ‘natural wealth’ that can be incessantly mined to yield stable streams of genomic data and economic value. Bioprospecting vessels traverse the ocean in order to extract fragments of the ‘ocean genome’ from copepods and plankton; extremophile bacteria; and sponges from the benthic zone, which can be sequenced and turned into genomic data. This data is then valorized as a ‘source asset’, an input mobilized in the production processes of pharmaceutical corporations and biotech start-ups.

4Looking at technoscientific practices of genomic extraction, the article participates in established anthropological debates on biocapital (Rajan 2006; Helmreich 2008), biovalue (Cooper 2011; Reis-Castro 2017), bioprospecting (Hayden 2003; Rest 2021; Raffaetà 2022: 46-57), and twenty-first century bioeconomies (Andersson 2022; Birch 2012). We aim to contribute to these debates through a critical perspective rooted in Marx’s critique of (bio)political economy, whose theoretical elaboration may guide and inform further ethnographic investigations. More specifically, we focus on the social construction of the ocean that is taking place through genomics, which we understand as encompassing at once an abstract scientific discourse about life and a very concrete set of technoscientific practices of extraction, abstraction, and manipulation of genetic matter. In order to mirror this duplicity of genomics, we combine a close analysis of the social practices that characterize marine bioprospecting and genomic extraction with a critical reflection upon the representations of nature – and more specifically of marine ecosystems – that are furthered by those very practices. In this way, we aim to bridge debates that have taken place in political economy (Thacker 2005; Loeppky 2013; Nye 2019) with the analysis of scientific practices and discourses that have characterized recent works both in anthropology (Rajan 2006; Helmreich 2009b; Cooper 2011; Raffaetà 2022) and in Science and Technology Studies (Birch, Tyfield 2013; Hilgartner 2017; Šlesingerová 2021).

5We maintain that the theoretical perspectives emerging from biopolitical economy – and partially covered in the scope of this article – may inform innovative ethnographic practices. This approach intends to go beyond the existing literature on bioethics, highlighting the necessity of a new wave of sociological and ethnographic studies focusing on how biotech practices of genomic extraction, abstraction and manipulation are reshaping capital accumulation, while materially reconfiguring the global biosphere. Following a long tradition within critical science studies (e.g. Mansfield 2017), the article uses recently published scientific literature as its data, which is analyzed by deploying a transdisciplinary methodology that mobilizes ethnographic practices (without claiming authority as a traditional ethnography), archival research (without posing as a traditional historiography), and theoretical reflection (without being a philosophical piece).

6This methodology reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the collective reflections promoted by the blue humanities (Alaimo 2019). This emergent research agenda has taken as one of its main objectives to study the many different ways in which maritime spaces continue to be reinvented by practices of mobility, political struggles, scientific endeavours, commercial ventures and imaginative investments. In the last decade, we have witnessed a multiplication of these oceanic practices as seascapes have rapidly turned into a frontier for a number of industrial endeavours that threaten marine ecosystems as well as into an increasingly contested political battleground. This has brought our attention to the increasingly urgent necessity to analyze the many navigational practices that contribute to the social construction of global seascapes, and their ongoing subsumption into processes of capital accumulation. In the present article, we continue this line of research by looking at metagenomic studies of the ocean and the bioprospecting expeditions on which they depend.

1. On the Genomic Frontier: Biopiracy, Bioprospecting and Genomic Extractivism

7Since the early 1980s, when a juridical revolution made possible for the first time the patenting of isolated DNA sequences and genetically-engineered organisms, the biotech sector has come to increasingly rely on the accumulation of genetic material, its translation into abstract genomic information, and its purposeful manipulation. This has gradually led to new conceptions of life and nature: biodiversity hotspots now appear as repositories of valuable genetic sequences, which can be collected and then manipulated to generate proprietary, patented life-forms. Today, the extraction of genetic matter from microorganisms, plants, animals, and human beings is as essential to the biotechnology industry as the extraction of minerals, coal and oil was for the first industrial revolution. Genomic bioprospecting is the first step to patenting isolated genetic sequences and to generating new genetically-engineered bodies that can then be sold and/or employed as living means of production in various economic sectors. It is not surprising, therefore, that genes have become an increasingly valuable biological resource. The biosphere has been mutated into a vast genomic mine waiting to be bio-prospected and excavated for deoxyribonucleic acids. There is, however, a fundamental ecological unevenness in the global commodity chains that characterize the rising biotech industry (Hornborg 1998; Dorninger et al. 2021). Most of the genetic resources that fuel the industry lie in the ecosystems of the Global South. Yet, the technological expertise and the capital investments needed to manipulate this new ‘genetic resource’ mostly reside in the scientific laboratories and the corporate boardrooms of the Global North (Jepson, Canney 2001). Corporations finance bioprospecting expeditions in biodiverse regions in search of rare genetic traits that may inform genomic research.

8In many important aspects, these collecting practices do not represent anything new. The history of modernity has been profoundly shaped by the mobilization of biological wealth for the advantage of imperial markets. The so-called Age of Exploration was motivated by the desire of discovering, classifying and collecting new biological resources – such as crops, fibers, dyes and medicines – as much as by the prospect of accumulating inert minerals (Mgbeoji 2005). Colonial agents dedicated a great deal of time and resources to biological research with the hope of finding ‘unknown’ living wonders, which could be transformed into lucrative global commodities. On occasion, the appropriation of a handful of seeds could shape imperial geographies – and global ecosystems – in profound and long-lasting ways. In 1876, for instance, Henry Wickham was contracted by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew to collect Hevea brasiliensis rubber tree seeds from Santarém in Brazil. Despite the country’s laws against exports of the precious seeds, Wickham managed to smuggle 70,000 of them on a steam ship to England. They were then germinated and sent to British colonies in India and Southeast Asia. The resulting plantations broke the Amazon rubber monopoly and dominated the world market until the invention of synthetic alternatives in the 1940s (Crosby 2004; Brockway 1979).

9Since the early 1990s, we have been living through «an historic revival of collecting», whence armies of genetic bioprospectors have taken the place of old-style colonial botanists (Hayden 2003). In search of rare genetic traits that might possess commercial value, corporate giants are tapping the huge reservoirs of biodiversity accumulated during the colonial era in botanical gardens and natural history museums, while financing novel expeditions across the Global South (Neimark 2012; Davidov 2013). A company that is currently at the forefront of the new economic frontiers opened up by the encounter of genomic bioprospecting and synthetic biology is Amyris, whose stated commercial goal is to ‘make infinite what is finite in the world’. Even a brief analysis of its business strategies can help illuminate the growing role played by genomic bioprospecting in global cycles of capital accumulation. Launched in 2003 with a grant from the Gates Foundation, the company initially focused on creating a synthetic metabolic-pathway for artemisinin: an antimalarial drug traditionally extracted from sweet wormwood, a plant mostly sourced from small farmers and wild harvesters in Vietnam, China and Eastern Africa (De Ridder et al. 2008).

10Amyris’ scientists sequenced the plant’s genome, isolating the sequence coding for amorphadiene synthase: an enzyme that catalyzes the production of artemisinic acid. They then produced a synthetic DNA fragment mimicking that genetic sequence and spliced it into the genome of yeast cells. The genetically-engineered cells began to express the synthetic DNA, thus producing artemisinic acid as part of their metabolism. The cells were then further modified to focus their metabolic activity almost exclusively on the production of the desired molecule, increasing production almost 500-fold. The new technology offers a biotech alternative to the traditional methods to produce artemisinin, which had so far relied exclusively on small-scale producers in the Global South (Ro 2006). As synthetic and semi-synthetic artemisinin have started to become available, the Netherlands Royal Tropical Institute projects that «pharmaceutical companies will accumulate control and power over the production process; Artemisia producers will lose a source of income; and local production, extraction and (possibly) manufacturing of ACT in regions where malaria is prevalent will shift to the main production sites of Western pharmaceutical companies» (Weathers 2010).

11In this case, as in many others, genomic bioprospecting has contributed to increase global production of a commercial drug by reconfiguring artisanal labor processes into bioindustrial ones. Following similar procedures and relying on existing programs of genomic bioprospecting, Amyris has created similar synthetic pathways for many other lucrative molecules, which are currently used in commodities made by more than 3,000 global brands. Its products include RealSweet(a sweetener produced by engineered yeast-strains); Santalols(a synthetic substitute for Indian sandalwood extract); and Neossance Squalane(a fermentation-derived molecule bioidentical to shark-derived squalane used in cosmetics). Genomic bioprospecting is increasingly aimed at isolating DNA sequences from bacteria, plants and animals coding for useful proteins, which are then spliced into the genome of so-called ‘bio-reactors’ (mostly bacterial and/or yeast cells). The resulting genetically-modified organisms are, thus, induced to produce the desired protein in controlled laboratory environments. Genetic materials are systematically extracted in the Global South and shipped to high-tech laboratories in the Global North. They are then transformed into abstract genomic data, and then into private living assets protected by intellectual property rights.

12The negotiations leading to the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) have legitimized, regulated and entrenched this unequal exchange practices, leading to the erection of a global framework for intellectual property protection. The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), in particular, established the necessary juridical infrastructure for the global operations characterizing the new genomic biopolitical economy. On the one hand, it guarantees that the sources of genetic knowledge remain freely accessible for research and exploratory bioprospecting. On the other hand, it provides worldwide protection to the resulting patents on recombinant molecules, gene-edited organisms and other products of the genomic industry (Robinson 2010). In this way, the molecular frontier was effectively turned into the latest terra nullius: an unowned empty space that can be freely appropriated by effective occupation-through-patenting. Owing to a neo-colonial legal framework, private companies have been able to extract naturally occurring genetic material and, subsequently, enclose it through intellectual-property monopolies (Shiva 2016: 6).

13The 1992 Rio Earth Summit saw highly politicized protests against corporate biopiracy: a concept that stressed that genomic bioprospecting represented a form of free-booting by which Western corporations could freely appropriate coveted genetic ‘raw materials’ throughout the Global South. The resulting UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) represented an attempt at compromise. The CBD no longer presents genetic resources as «a common heritage of mankind», which «should be available to anyone without restriction». Instead, states have been given control over their so-called «genetic resources» – that is, over the DNA molecules of each and every living organism dwelling in their sovereign territories. This unprecedented doctrine of genetic sovereignty affirms an instrumentalist view of living organisms, while providing states with the juridical power necessary to secure at least a fraction of the economic returns generated by the rising genomic industry. The treaty strives to create new economic incentives for biodiversity conservation by turning biodiversity into a standing-reserve of molecular raw materials, and thus into a national resource worthy of protection: a neoliberal approach to conservation, which promises to realize ecological governance through the extension and deepening of market mechanisms (Bhattacharya 2014).

14However, the CBD remains a non-legally binding, soft law instrument. Its terms and conditions are not subject to review by any independent regulatory body, and no sanction is prescribed for those who violate them. It is hardly surprising that the royalties offered by bioprospecting companies have largely remained an empty promise. Despite the publicity given to a handful of cases, most «access and share agreements» have been absolutely futile bureaucratic exercises (Parry 2004). Given the increasing ease by which sequenced genes can be synthetically reproduced, and the simple fact that most plants and animals do not respect national borders, companies can easily cover up the exact source of their biological raw materials. According to one of the most attentive studies on the subject, completed more than a decade after the signing of the CBD, «all royalty payments still remain projected; nothing has yet been disbursed to supplying countries in recompense for the use of collected materials through this mechanism» (Parry 2004: 227; Blakeney 2019). As we will see in the next section, the granting of sovereign rights over national biological resources has done little to challenge genetic enclosure. It has, rather, facilitated the transformation of biodiversity into a private economic resource.

15Moreover, the CBD does not apply to spaces beyond national jurisdiction: an increasingly significant legislative gap since the global oceans are rapidly becoming a frontier for increasingly ambitious operations of genomic extraction. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of patented genetic sequences resulting from corporate bioprospecting of the global oceans. Recent projections suggest that the value of the emerging global marine biotechnology market could reach $6.4 billion by 2025 (Blasiak et al. 2018: 313; Kintish 2018). In particular, bioprospecting ventures at sea have been targeting so-called extremophiles: deep-sea creatures that can survive under extreme environmental conditions and often metabolize unique biochemical compounds. As of 2020, 12,998 genetic sequences from marine species have been patented with 47 per cent of those patents belonging to a single multinational chemical giant: BASF, based in Ludwigshafen in Germany – a figure that indicates growing corporate control over marine genetic resources (Blasiak et al. 2018: 312).

16Our reflections on the ways in which oceans are being reinvented through genomic science and the activities of the genomic industry have been spurred by the interviews, private conservations, scientific lectures, and symposia that took place at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Marine and Polar Research during the first author’s 2022 academic residency. These two institutions sponsor genomic studies of the ocean and conduct collecting expeditions in many areas of the global oceans. In this context, we began to reflect upon the ways in which the ‘genomic gaze’ is stimulating new conceptions of ocean spaces. We began to ask ourselves and to the scientists we encountered: how can we understand navigational practices of genomic bioprospecting – both public and private – as cultural practices of social construction of the ocean? How are these practices leading marine microbiologists and molecular biologists to imagine an ‘ocean genome’? But also: how can we contextualize this new age of oceanic explorations in the context of a more general turn towards a mode of production that increasingly relies on the accumulation of genetic matter, its abstraction into genomic data and its purposeful manipulation? What role does the ‘ocean genome’ play into the emergent bio-economy?

2. Mining the Ocean Genome: Marine Bioprospecting Since the Sorcerer II Expedition

17The growing integration of ocean spaces within the shifting geographies of the global market can be understood as the point of convergence of a number of historical trajectories, including: the increasing importance of maritime logistics and oceanic transportation since the container revolution (Khalili 2021); the dramatic expansion of submarine cable infrastructures since the introduction of global fiber-optics networks in the 1990s (Starosielski 2015); the multiplication of extractivist activities having maritime spaces as their theater of operation – i.e. fishing, mining, oil-pumping etc. (Childs 2020); the expansion of wind farming and other ocean-bound facilities, which turn ocean spaces into platforms for the production of electrical power (Graham 2019); the emergence of scientific knowledges and technological systems that open up the vertical dimension of the deep sea to multiple practices of genomic observation, exploitation and extraction (Hessler 2019; Braverman 2022). The marine gene-grab is already well underway, leading to growing corporate control over marine genetic resources. Some of these genetic sequences have been already valorized as raw materials in the recombinant production processes of the global chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Many more have been claimed as promissory financial assets that hold present exchange-value only in view of their potential, future use-values (Birch 2017).

18The rise of the «ocean genome» as a new extractivist frontier poses a number of contentious questions that may be taken as starting points for critical investigations and future ethnographic endeavours: Who owns «the ocean genome»? How – i.e. through what forms of scientific and legal labor – is ownership over «the ocean genome» established? And then: How should genomic extractivism be regulated? What can the global struggles surrounding bioprospecting tell us about the shifting role of ocean space in the global political economy? These political questions, which are now at the forefront of numerous international negotiations and diplomatic tensions, have not emerged from the abstract ruminations of bioethicists in specialized academic departments. Rather, they organically emerged from the practical problems posed by the gradual expansion of ocean bioprospecting activities in the last twenty years (Kintisch 2018). Historically, they can be traced back to the early 2000s, when large-scale ocean sampling expeditions started to be organized on a global scale.

19The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling expedition – a circumnavigation of the Earth organized by the Craig Venter Institute, in collaboration with the US Department of Energy – represented one of the first, and certainly the most notorious, examples of this historical tendency. Between 2004 and 2006, corporate scientists sailed around the world to collect, sequence and catalog the genetic material found in seawater. The journey of the Sorcerer II was widely presented and celebrated as an unprecedented oceanographic expedition, providing a new vision of ocean ecosystems enabled by high-tech metagenomic methodologies and sequencing machines. At the same time, the journey was also explicitly constructed to celebrate and mimic Darwin’s famous journey on the Beagle. The scientific vessel set out from Halifax, crossed the Atlantic, sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, before going past the Galápagos Islands and into the open Pacific. Due to the complex political geographies that characterize the twenty-first century global ocean, however, what was presented as a revolutionary scientific venture, rapidly turned into a legal and political quagmire. As noted by Venter in a 2004 lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: «These studies aren’t as easy as it might seem at first. We have a team of three full-time people that just have to work with the US State Department and each of these countries to be able to take zoo liters of seawater from their waters. We have to have import and export permits and people get very excited about this. So, it's not as simple as taking zoo liters of seawater. In fact, we're dealing right now with a group that’s protesting us taking biological samples in Ecuador. The other thing – it was a big surprise to me – there’s very little international waters left in the world. Here, I thought I was just out sailing free in the ocean and somebody’s claimed it all! » (Helmreich 2009: 198-199).

20In this and other texts, Venter pointed to several conflicts emerging from global marine bioprospecting activities and, more generally, from the rapid growth of the so-called ‘blue economy’ (Germond-Duret 2022). First of all, Venter’s oceanic venture encountered the political opposition of various environmental groups. The ETC Group, for instance, described Venter’s expedition as a novel form of piracy aimed at extracting raw materials to be employed in the rapidly-growing biotech industry. In a 2004 article titled «Playing God in the Galapagos: J. Craig Venter, Master and Commander of Genomics, on Global Expedition to Collect Microbial Diversity for Engineering Life», a sketch portrays the Sorcerer II as a fully-automated pirate ship extracting biological samples from the surrounding oceans, while Venter celebrates the genomic plunder in an early-modern looking colonial attire. In the background, a storm is about to arrive, perhaps indicating impending ecological collapse (Helmreich 2009: 198-199). The drawing represents Venter’s bioprospecting expedition as the continuation of centuries of colonial operations aimed at collecting and studying the world’s biological diversity in order to conceive new ways of exploiting it. Shortly after, Venter was nominated by the American Coalition Against Biopiracy for the coveted prize of «Greediest Biopirate», «for undertaking, with flagrant disregard for national sovereignty over biodiversity, a US-funded global biopiracy expedition» (Rimmer 2009: 151).

21Additionally, Venter’s expedition struggled with the legal obstacles imposed by various nation-states. Ecuador and French Polynesia, whose territorial waters were crossed by the Sorcerer II, opposed the sampling because they feared it constituted an attempt to plunder their genetic resources (Delfanti et al. 2009: 421-426). More generally, Venter lamented the extent to which states can leverage global regulations such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, imposing royalties on the extraction of genomic resources from their territorial waters. These regulations were set in place starting from the early 1990s in response to some sovereign states’ demands for a more equitable redistribution of the profits deriving from bioprospecting operations. However, this governance regime does not apply to the ‘high seas’: a global space in which bioprospecting remains essentially unregulated (Delgado 2021). It would not be incorrect to say that bioprospecting in the high seas represents a contemporary form of ‘free-booting’ in the technical legal sense insofar as it represents a form of appropriation in an unregulated spatiality beyond the law (Policante 2016: 63-65). This space of commercial freedom, nevertheless, is becoming smaller and may soon disappear. In 1982, the recognition that coastal states may exercise control over an Exclusive Economic Zone of up to 200 nautical miles from the coast considerably reduced the area denominated as «the high sea». In 2020, moreover, negotiations began in the United Nations to introduce regulations over bioprospecting in the high seas (Flemsæter 2020).

22While the exact form of these regulations is still uncertain and subject to political debate, the last draft text «on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction», which is currently under discussion at the United Nations, poses that no single State «shall claim or exercise sovereignty or sovereign rights over marine genetic resources of areas beyond national jurisdiction» and that «the utilization of marine genetic resources of areas beyond national jurisdiction shall be in the interests of all States and for the benefit of mankind as a whole […]». If approved this addendum to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea would impose a sort of global tax on bioprospecting activities in the high seas, which would correspond to «2 per cent of the value of sales of the product the commercialization of which is based on the utilization of marine genetic resources of areas beyond national jurisdiction» (UN 2023: 6-11). ‘Biological and genetic materials’ residing in the high-seas would thus cease to be res nullius (i.e. objects that can be freely appropriated by anyone) to become res communis (i.e. objects that are property of the international community and whose appropriation must– in some way – be approved by the international community). This shift may soon impose a further limit to large-scale commercial operations of genomic bioprospecting.

23Despite these legal and political obstacles, Craig Venter’s expedition was generally described as a resounding success. In January 2006, the vessel returned to New England, and the samples collected were sent to the Venter Institute for sequencing and bioinformatics analysis. With its 6.5 million genetic sequences analyzed and 6.3 billion base pairs cataloged, the expedition created what was then the largest metagenomic database in the world (Rusch et. al. 2007; Nealson, Venter 2007: 185-187). For some, the first genomic exploration of ocean ecosystems represented an «attempt to change our planet's future by cracking the ocean code» (Conover 2005); for others, it was «the largest effort to describe the genetic diversity in the world’s oceans» (Nicholls 2007). Certainly, the Sorcerer II expedition pioneered new ways of seeing and exploiting oceanic spaces, which are now becoming more widespread as a growing number of corporations – across a number of economic sectors – are starting to mobilize genomic data in their processes of production (Borg, Policante 2022).

24It inaugurated a new era of maritime explorations that is now sparking novel understandings of the ocean, while reconstructing this transnational space as a yet-unclaimed genomic mine from which ‘wet’ genetic matter can be extracted and transformed into valuable genomic data. Collecting genetic material of potential value continues to motivate large-scale maritime expeditions. Another prominent example of this historical tendency is the Tara Oceans Project sponsored by a public-private partnership that brought together the French National Center for Scientific Research and several private partners from the most different branches of industry (Sunagawa et al. 2020:428-429). From 2003 to 2010, a small international team of marine biologists toured 210 stations in every major oceanic region, collecting more than 35,000 planktonic samples on a 110-foot research schooner.

25The cost of the expedition was over €3 million per year. The expedition constituted «the biggest genetic sequencing task ever undertaken on marine organisms» (Tara Oceans 2023) both in terms of its global horizons (covering all the major oceans) and of its unprecedented vertical depth (collecting water samples as deep as 1,000 meters below the waves). The collected water samples were analyzed on board using advanced DNA sequencing techniques, and the data transferred on several publicly accessible informatics databases on land (Richter et al. 2022). Since 2007, the over 40 million genetic sequences that were deposited on the servers owned by the Tara Foundation have become a virtual resource through which marine biologists are constructing new understandings of the global ocean (Zhang, Ning 2015: 275-281). As stated on the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) website, «Tara Oceans results reveal climate change insights, and a treasure trove of novel species and genes». Over 27 per cent of the collected genes do not match any currently known living organism, confirming the fact that maritime ecosystems remain largely unknown and little understood (Tully et al. 2018: 1-8). The final assessment of the project concluded that «fishing for plankton at a depth of up to 1,000 meters in more than 200 places on our ocean planet revealed the unknown: we have multiplied by more than 100 the types of known marine virus DNA, discovered more than 100,000 species of single-celled microalgae and revealed more than 150 million genes» (Tara Oceans 2023).

26Bioprospecting operations such as the Sorcerer II and the Tara Oceans expeditions – fuelled by an unprecedented interest in the extraction and abstraction of deoxyribonucleic acids – are remaking the political ecology of the oceans, while producing new objects of study and subjects of value. Far from being purely scientific practices, they are social and political forms of navigation that contribute to new ways of thinking, living and functionally employing the global oceanscape. The ocean has become a primary source of genetic materials, which are subsequently sequenced, translated in coded genomic data and then used to inform recombinant DNA practices, genome editing technologies and biotech innovations. As Jesus Arrieta also contends, the extraction of marine genetic resources is no longer a futuristic vision but a growing source of biotechnological and business opportunities» (2010: 18318). Genomic extractivism at sea is rapidly growing. So far, over eighteen thousand natural products and almost five thousand patents have resulted from the isolation of the genetic material enclosed in the cells of marine organisms, and this large-scale industrial undertaking is projected to grow rapidly in the near future (Blasiak et al. 2018: 312).

27As we will see in the next section, the genomic gaze is contributing to the social construction of new conceptions of the seas and oceans. New industrial practices and global value chains are being constructed on the basis of the abstraction, circulation and manipulation of valuable genetic sequences extracted from the marine biota. Marine bioprospecting is also stimulating geopolitical conflicts over the ownership of marine genetic resources and the distribution of the economic benefits that may derive from their exploitation. New legal concepts and doctrines are being debated and pushed through in order to regulate the growth of genomic extractivism in the high seas.

3. Valorizing the Ocean Genome: Biopolitical Economies of Genomic Extraction, Abstraction and Manipulation

28According to a recent Blue Paper by the World Resources Institute, commissioned by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, the global economy will increasingly rely on new ways of studying, extracting and valorizing the «ocean genome». In this conception, the ocean genome is an extremely concrete, organic and material entity: «the genetic material present in all marine biodiversity, including both the physical genes and the information they encode» or, in other words, the total mass of deoxyribonucleic acids resting in the uncountable living cells that inhabit the ocean. However, the «ocean genome» is also an abstraction: an invisible totality which becomes visible and thinkable only today as a result of «rapid advances in sequencing technologies and bioinformatics». It is conceived as the molecular base that sustains ocean ecologies and economies. It «determines the abundance and resilience of biological resources, including fisheries and aquaculture». It represents «the foundation upon which all marine ecosystems, including their functionality and resilience, rest». It is, therefore, imagined to be at once: a promising source of economic value, a potential target of bio-extractivist practices, and an object of environmental regulation and control (Blasiak et al. 2020: 2-3).

29The exploration of the ocean genome, the authors point out, is only at the beginning; and yet, genetic materials collected at sea have already enabled the development of a number of commercial products, including «industrial enzymes, pharmaceuticals, cosmeceuticals, nutraceuticals, antifoulants, adhesives and tools for research and conservation purposes» (Ibidem: 8). The recent development of genomic science itself is dependent on the bioprospecting of thermophilic microbes such as Thermus Acquaticus: first isolated by Thomas Brock in the 1960s in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park – and since then found and extracted from sites where water reaches elevated temperatures, including geysers, power plants and hydrothermal vents in the deep oceans (Brock 1997; Marteinsson et al. 1995). It was a particular enzyme extracted by this bacterium that enabled the development of polymerase chain reaction (PCR): a technique now widely used to amplify DNA samples in vitro (Innis et al. 1988). Thanks to PCR techniques, even a very small sample of DNA can be multiplied over and over to be then sequenced, spliced and/or genome edited. This technique is not only at the base of the high-throughput sequencing techniques that inform most genomic and metagenomic studies, but it is also an essential means of production mobilized by the genomic industry (Raffaetà 2022: 26).

30PCR represents one of the most valuable techniques resulting from bioprospecting activities in aquatic environments, but it is no longer an isolated example. The industrial extraction, abstraction and manipulation of the ocean genome is increasingly presented as having «considerable potential to address global challenges related to population health and environmental sustainability and to serve as an engine for greener and smarter economies» (Wiese 2012: 148-149). The value of a genomic sequence is not limited to the knowledge it provides. It is also the starting point for emerging techniques of genome editing and synthetic biology. Tweaking the sequenced genome of bacteria, plants and animals, corporations are constructing new generations of gene-edited bodies, purposefully designed to assist the accumulation of capital in a range of economic sectors going from agriculture to aquaculture, from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals (Borg, Policante 2022). One of the most striking results of the rapid growth of bioprospecting operations at sea is the unprecedented number of marine species that have suddenly entered the global economy as promising sources of economic value. While fishing trawlers continue to traverse the liquid frontiers in search of traditional commercial targets such as salmons, tuna and swordfish, new types of ships navigate around the world on a technoscientific hunt for living organisms such as copepods, sponges, extremophilic bacteria and archaea (Stel 2021; Hosseini 2022; Laakman et al. 2020).

31Bioprospecting ventures reveal the irreducible complexity of ocean ecosystems, teeming with innumerable living organisms that remain unnamed (Richter et al. 2022; Royo-Llonch 2021). They pull many new species out of the abyssal darkness of the oceanic depths and into the light of scientific taxonomic tables and market valuations. The value attached to these new ‘species of value’, however, no longer depends on the edibility of their flesh but rather on the specific biochemical composition of the genomic matter trapped in their cells (Waldby 2002). For instance, genomic material extracted from the blood of ocean pout – a deep water fish found in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean – have been spliced into Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The resulting recombinant yeast cells have been induced to metabolize antifreeze, ice-structuring proteins that are now widely used by a number of ice-cream producing companies to control «ice recrystallization after freeze-thaw cycles, which could affect the ice cream’s taste and texture» (Irwin 2020). The very same genomic material, once extracted from ocean pouts and isolated in vitro, has been utilized by the Canadian company AquaBounty Technologies to inform the production of fast-growing recombinant salmons. Thanks to the genetic sequences from ocean pout that have been spliced into its genome, AquAdvantage Salmon grows faster, all-year round, even at low water temperatures (Naing, Kim 2019). By combining different genomic fragments collected by bioprospecting expeditions, a company established control over a proprietary variety of fish, whose accelerated metabolism has been purposefully designed in order to accelerate capital accumulation (Clausen, Longo 2012; Schneider 2022).

32It is this capacity of turning ‘nature’ into genomic data – and data into valorizable commercial products – that allows many observers to conceive of the genomic bioeconomy as a sustainable alternative to traditional extractive industries. «Unlike prospecting for material commodities such as minerals and timber», Cori Hayden writes in When Nature Goes Public, «biodiversity prospecting is not dependent on large-scale harvests of raw material»: «a few milligrams of extract might be all it takes to provide the lead to a useful compound» (2008: 53-54). An exclusive focus on the limited natural resources necessary for the production of genomic knowledge, however, obscures the fact that each genomic sequence is the end-result of a complex global chain of production. Genetic data is not a «free gift» of nature (Burkett 1999), but a socially produced bio-object. It is a technoscientific abstraction from biotic material, whose production mobilizes waged scientists in research laboratories; corporate ‘bioprospectors’ at sea; unpaid, volunteer ‘citizen-scientists’; as well as biodiversity cataloguers employed in botanical gardens and museums of natural history. It relies on publicly funded research projects, whose knowledge-products are then enclosed and privatized. It exploits centuries of ‘universal labor’ crystallized in libraries of scientific textbooks and circulated through shared research methodologies (Zeller 2007; Mazzuccato 2015).

33As soon as we shift the analytical gaze to the dark abodes of genomic production, the immaterial bioeconomy reveals itself to be very much material. Genomic explorations of the global ocean mobilize an ever-expanding set of labors and infrastructures: bioprospecting ships rely on the securitization of global shipping lines and the international legal apparatus that enable genomic extraction at sea; marine specimens must be extracted from the depths and stored on board; the genetic material must be transferred through logistical networks to associated laboratories around the world; laboratory analysis depends on the existence of bioinformatics platforms and data banks; finally, the resulting genomic data is circulated through global fiber-optic cable webs to be then stored in an enormous and ever-expanding infrastructure of energy-intensive server farms. Most importantly, no genomic sequence is a finished product, which can be valorized on the market as such. Rather, it functions as a ‘source asset’: an input mobilized in the production of genetically-engineered living means of production and biotech commodities (Blasiak 2020).

34The biotech industry is developing ways to guarantee the rapid valorization of the scientific knowledge produced by bioprospecting expeditions and associated mass-sequencing efforts. Facilitating the institutionalization of property over the «ocean genome», it prepares the ground for the inclusion of a new invisible frontier – at once vast and microscopic – into the expansive geography of the world market. Genomics creates the technical conditions for a novel production paradigm: a ‘bioeconomy’ based on the systematic extraction of genomic data, and its subsequent utilization as a means of production on an industrial scale. Ocean spaces beyond national jurisdiction have, therefore, assumed an unprecedented promissory value. Some of the genetic materials abstracted from the deep ocean have found immediate industrial applications - enabling the manufacturing of genetically-engineered yeasts producing antifreeze proteins, genome-edited microbes, recombinant salmons etc. Many more have been isolated, abstracted and patented in order to claim exclusive ownership (in the present) in view of possible biotechnological applications (in the future). As Melinda Cooper points out, «in the absence of any tangible assets or actual profits, what the biotech start-up can offer is a proprietary claim over the future life forms it might give rise to, along with the profits that accrue from them […] turning life science speculation into a highly profitable—indeed rational—enterprise» (Cooper 2011: 28).

35The realization of a future, genomic-based ocean economy, however, is far from certain. According to the authors of the above-mentioned Blue Paper, the valorization of the ocean genome requires new forms of government and demands urgent solutions to two fundamental political obstacles. First of all, new political conflicts are likely to arise over the distribution of the economic wealth produced through the exploitation of a shared resource such as the ocean genome (Nickels 2020: 193-194; Jarvis, Young 2023: 179-180). As we have seen, the value chains characterizing the genomic industry reflect a troubling neo-colonialist bias. While the CBD established the notion of ‘genomic sovereignty’ on land, the ocean genome continues to be sampled, valorized and exploited by public and private institutions as a free and open ‘global commons’. Yet, the isolated genetic sequences and the gene-edited bodies that result from further manipulations of those very genetic resources are then introduced in the global market as products of scientific labor, which can be legally claimed as exclusive, patented property. Despite all its apparent newness, therefore, the expansion of the so-called bio-economy is likely to perpetuate and exacerbate historical inequalities. Genomics is a technology-intensive labor process in which the mastery of fixed capital represents the key for what is often represented as an abstract ‘unlocking’ of value. A high organic composition of capital is necessary: not only to produce genomic data, but to utilize that data as a factor of production. For those without capital, the door to the realization of value in the bioeconomy remains firmly locked (Harvey 2003: 147-148).

36Second, the success of bioprospecting activities depends on the existence of an increasingly threatened biodiversity. As the Blue Paper recognizes «the ocean genome is threatened by overexploitation, habitat loss and degradation, pollution, impacts from a changing climate, invasive species and other pressures, as well as their cumulative and interacting effects» (Blasiak et al. 2020; Arrieta et al. 2010). From this point of view, genomic and metagenomic data collected at sea is valued insofar as it may inform new environmental policies and regulations. For instance, gathering information on the genetics and metabolism of oceanic life-forms can provide precious indications of how marine ecosystems are likely to react to climate change and the eutrophication of coastal waters (Delmont 2010). It can also provide a clue of which maritime areas are characterized by high biodiversity and, therefore, are most in need of being included in special protected areas (Jeffery 2022). Finally, it can stimulate new ways of looking at marine life, which are less attentive to the distinctive characteristics of isolated species, but rather focuses on the interaction of different microbial and animal communities and how these ‘marine interspecies assemblages’ collectively shape marine environments’ (Laakman et al. 2020).

37Ultimately, the authors of the Blue Paper intend to push policymakers away from traditional policies aimed at protecting ‘ocean spaces’ and ‘marine biodiversity’ to focus future political efforts on preserving the natural capital enclosed in the ‘ocean genome’ (Blasiak et al. 2020). How can the ocean genome be captured and preserved in an historical moment in which many of the species in which it is enclosed appear to be on the brink of extinction? The threat of biodiversity loss has casted a new sense of urgency to existing activities of genomic extractivism, which are now presented as a promising, high-tech conservation strategy. The Ocean Genome Legacy Center, for instance, is a recently funded «genome bank dedicated to exploring and preserving the threatened biological diversity of the sea» (Falco et al. 2022: 104). The project presents itself as a technoscientific race against time: collecting genetic material from marine living organisms, sequencing their genomes, and preserving their abstract code before they are swept away by the Sixth Mass Extinction. Metagenomic sequencing is presented as a way of extracting value from the ocean depths, while preserving its biodiversity by abstracting from its wet materiality: capturing a snapshot of an ocean genome that is gradually impoverished by processes of extinction and biodiversity loss (Waterton 2013: 1-19).

38This most recent wave of oceanic explorations and genomic extractions appears to increasingly further the neoliberal practices that Kathleen McAfee theorized as promoting ways of «selling nature to save it», which «abstracts nature from its spatial and social contexts» and recode ecosystems «as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology industries» (1999: 133). It remains to be seen if marine bioprospecting will be able to ‘save nature’ by mastering practices of genomic extraction, abstraction and manipulation; or if such expeditions will finally amount to little more than a form of genomic taxidermy: digitally recording the sequence of base pairs composing the genome of marine life-forms so that the latter can continue to contribute to capital accumulation even after thorough extinction.

4. Conclusion

39As Philip Steinberg has shown, throughout modernity different political and economic forces have shaped alternative representations of the sea (Steinberg 2001). Ocean space has served – and continues to serve – multiple social functions: it is a logistical platform on which container ships practice their freedom of circulation (Cowen 2014); a military battleground traversed by aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines (Oreskes 2021; a global fishing ground where corporations are able to escape state regulations and exploit both workers and natural ecosystems beyond what would be possible on land (Mansfield 2004); a necropolitical borderscape in which migrant crossings are turned into deadly traps (Heller, Pezzani 2014: 659); an open plane of mobility in which migrants trace their autonomous routes and express their «right to escape» (Mezzadra 2014); an heterotopia in which pirates and outcasts can experiment with alternative social models (Policante 2016). Each of these social functions has engendered distinctive – and often conflicting – representations of the sea, which have sometimes informed divergent regulatory regimes.

40The multiplication of diverse social practices of navigation in the Anthropocene Ocean represents both an opportunity and a challenge for anthropology and the social sciences. It demands increasing attention to ocean spaces, understood as complex socio-ecological networks as well as increasingly important sites of capital accumulation (Johnson, Braverman 2020: 14). Contributing to this collective research project - which has been central to the writings of the Ermenautica collective in the last five years (Aria 2021) - the present article focused on ocean bioprospecting expeditions, understood as peculiar forms of social navigation that generate new forms of scientific knowledge and economic value through the extraction of the ‘ocean genome’. The emergence of genomic approaches to the scientific study and capital valorization of living organisms and global ecosystems has sparked a new age of oceanic explorations. By integrating genomic tools, large-scale collecting expeditions such as the Sorcerer II expedition and the Tara Oceans project have been presented as offering new ways of understanding and exploiting the ocean. They constitute, in other words, practices of mobility through which maritime spaces are socially constructed in new ways.

41In the last decade, bioprospecting expeditions have started to reinvent the ocean as a global site of public and private practices of genomic extraction. By traversing the global ocean, scientific vessels employed in genomic and meta-genomic sampling, have sparked new ways of reading and interpreting marine ecosystems. On the one hand, by using genomic and metagenomic tools, marine biologists are reconstructing the ocean in the social imagination as a space in which alien forms of life thrive, and unknown species go extinct before having even entered the taxonomic tables. Oceanic expeditions such as Tara Oceans have led to a growing realization that marine ecosystems remain largely unknown; while genomic data banks such as the Ocean Genome Legacy Center are being set up in order to preserve the genetic codes characterizing a rapidly disappearing marine biodiversity. On the other hand, biotech entrepreneurs such as Craig Venter and global corporations such as BASF are re-imagining maritime spaces as genomic mines: transnational spaces from which genomic sequences can be extracted and abstracted to be then valorized in biotech laboratories around the world. This genetic data can then be offered as a «source asset» to biotech corporations interested in developing new pharmaceutical commodities, semi-synthetic flavourings and recombinant organisms.

42Paradoxically, as genomics make visible for the first time the irreducible complexity of the biological networks reproducing themselves under the waves, corporations are already embarking on increasingly ambitious programs to excavate the ocean genome for profit. Genomic explorations of the ocean reveal the limited capacity of science to fathom the ocean’s living depth. And yet, at the very same time, genomic sampling is increasingly deployed as an instrument to extract and abstract valorizable genetic raw materials from the living cells of an ocean biota threatened by extinction. This tension indicates once more the extent in which the ocean is a socio-ecological space, whose meaning emerges historically and politically from the encounter of disparate practices of power and knowledge.

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1 This research was supported by the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA –FCSH and by the Associate Laboratory for Research IN2PAST. The IHC is funded by National funds through FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the projects UIDB/04209/2020 and UIDP/04209/2020.We would also like to thank the reviewers of Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

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Amedeo Policante e Erica Borg, «Mining the Ocean Genome: Global Bioprospecting Expeditions and Genomic Extractivism on the Oceanic Frontier»Archivio antropologico mediterraneo [Online], Anno XXVI, n. 25 (1) | 2023, online dal 24 juin 2023, consultato il 27 avril 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/aam/6994; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/aam.6994

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Amedeo Policante

Institute of Contemporary History (FCSH/IN2PAST), NOVA University of Lisbonpolicante@fcsh.unl.pt

Erica Borg

King’s College, London erica.borg@kcl.ac.uk

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