Controlling nature's data

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1:26world around you, about the soil, the rivers, the tree roots. Look closer. What lives in each tiny millimetre? And then closer still, through a microscope, at the billions or trillions of microbes, fungi, bacteria. At this level, life is still largely unexplored. What if something there, in the soil beneath your feet, would lead to a cure for cancer.

2:01Among the forests of southwest Cameroon, in the community of Ngompem, a team of researchers has arrived with backpacks of scientific instruments.

2:13I think our equipment are all ready. Let's set our equipment. They crouch down, overlooked by tall trees, over a patch of orange sandy ground. They're digging up small scoops of soil, seemingly at random.

2:35What they need is something none of us can see, genetic information. That's good enough. Yes. So for the air temperature, we have 25. The DNA of species of microbes that perhaps no one has ever discovered before. It might look simple, but this work has already made one company in London in the UK tens of millions of dollars.

3:01Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service and the AI race to harvest and harness nature's DNA. It's a new frontier, but who should own this crucial natural information and how will it change the world? We're Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor and this is Controlling Nature's Data.

3:35Hello. Hello. Well, this is exciting. I'm Dan. Nice to meet you. I can't shake your hands. It might be the future of medicine, but it's not always glamorous. We knew you were the scientist because you aptly dress in bright orange and looking very practical. 3 ,000 miles from that Cameroonian forest, we're in the north of England with two British researchers collecting samples, just like their colleagues over there. And with a decent pair of wellies, may I say. So probably some of the best I've seen. Brand new. Brand new. I'm very proud of them. Dan and I are husband and wife, and we're environment journalists.

4:10So we spend a lot of our lives together outdoors. This is new, though. We're on a poo hunt. We weren't told this before we came, but that's what we're doing, are we? We're on a poo hunt. You're completely correct. As we trudge through marshland with the researchers, were searching for pellets of rabbit poo. When you're really lucky, there's still steam coming off the poo samples. That's a good find. It's a good day when that happens. When they find some... Here's some fresher rabbit poo here. So I think maybe we can collect... They carefully scoop it up, weigh out exactly five grams on jewellery scales and seal it inside a small sterile plastic bag.

4:46People listening to this might think, well, what are they going to find in poo? But is there potentially something exciting to be found here? Absolutely. So I think the truth of the matter is a lot of microbes are undiscovered. So I think they reckon there's around less than 1 % that are actually known. That's down to the fact that this field is fairly nascent. Already in our database there's a huge number of microbes that could be completely new species. We know one drop in the Atlantic Ocean in terms of the number of microbial species that are documented. That's mad, isn't it? Which is crazy.

5:19At the end of the day, the unassuming bags of poo, soil and other samples collected here will be heading back to the company's labs in London. Sack full of science to go back with.

5:32And a few days later, we're headed there too. Hello. Hi, base camp? Yes, of course, Dr Marlon, just recognised you, sorry. How are you doing? This is a slightly different environment than when we last met. We're visiting the headquarters of the company behind all this, Basecamp Research. This very much has the feel of an emerging company here. There's the odd bag of crystal. It's a trendy office built over four stories around a courtyard. The founders are both in their early 30s and a lot of their employees look young too. Lots of hoodies and fashionable glasses. They make us a coffee with vegan milk and then one of the founders, Glenn, shows us around.

6:16Where are we now? We're upstairs in the heart of the company, which is really where our data comes from. We're starting to see a laboratory. Can I poke my head in? Is that OK? Yeah, of course. This is really where we translate it from something physical, like soil, into something that ultimately can be turned into data. OK, we'll leave them in pieces. Very nice. The company is only five years old, and it has the feel of a tech start-up, like things are happening in a rush. We just repainted this room. It would normally be on the wall. They're taking over new spaces in the building. I hate to say, I think your plants need watering as well, don't they?

6:45I mean, yes, they really do. For a company that analyzes biodiversity, the office of biodiversity is not doing so well. And when we sit down to chat with the founders... Oh, this is good. Okay, now we're talking. Well, we're in the process of expanding. It's in a huge tent, which they've put up inside. A big white canvas dome inside the meeting room. We've never seen anything like it. It looks very, very similar to the tent that we ran some of the early expeditions in. and we're not forgetting the roots of where all of this data comes from, which is from the hard graft of our team. Tents like this being deployed in all sorts of crazy locations, it's a nod to that side of the company.

7:23This would almost make me feel a bit sad, though, because I'd want to be in the tent in the wild. It's almost like longing for where this tent is. It is, although I'll be honest, this tent does actually leak, so it's just as well that it's indoors and not outside.

7:37So we wriggle through a flap into the tent to hear how this all started. From the company's British founders, Glenn Gowers, and Oliver Vince. So Glenn and I have known each other for more than a decade. We met when we were 18 on the first day of university. In the bar. Thanks, Glenn. Oliver was a computer engineer and Glenn was a biochemist, and for the next few years they joined each other on expeditions around the world, eventually reaching Iceland. The ski's parallel, Ollie.

8:11Ahead of us is Kvjökfjöl. So that's the first time we've seen the big mountain range, which is on the northern side of the ice cap. They lived together on the Vatna-Yurkug ice cap for a month. So we're here in the hot spring gorge. Now what we're going to try and do is collect some samples to sequence back on the ice cap in our mobile sledge-driven lab. A snowy wonderland. Wow, just when you said birds were your favourite thing, look at that. Unbelievable. So many birds. With everything they needed to study new life on the back of a sledge. We just did our DNA extraction protocol using my sleeping bag lab and we've converted a bit of soil into this tiny tube of DNA here.

8:56Quality check the flow cell. They were sequencing the genomes of the microbes they found, that is, identifying their genetic maker. So let's hope for green. Green is good. It's looking very good. And we're sequencing! This has worked! Yes! We were basically sat studying this hot spring that no one had ever looked at before and discovered that by far and away the vast majority of life that was in this hot spring was completely unknown to science. It was a moment that changed everything. At what point did you realise, wow, we're really onto something here? The lightbulb moment was realising that the majority of what we were seeing was so different to what was out there in reference databases that it's the same thing as going into a library and seeing the majority of books containing words you've never seen in a language you've never heard of.

9:47We couldn't even say whether it was from an archaea, bacteria, plant or animal. It was that different to anything that was known. I guess the most remarkable thing about it is it is just a lump of soil at the end of the day. It's a lump of soil that looks like any other. And I think that gives you an idea of just the diversity that is all around us and all across our planet. But you take this lump of soil, you process it. We're using the portable lab. You process it on site and you sort of get the first readout of what's in that sample. And when you first get the pie chart, basically, of how much is unknown, it's sort of quite bewildering because you generally tend to assume that we understand the vast majority of life on Earth.

10:24at least as humans we have some concept of what the things might do. That level of unknown out there was the big shock to us and really set in motion a lot of the ideas around how do we fill in that gap, that data gap. And so their company was born and they knew their mission, to learn the genetic makeup of microbes and microorganisms around the world. They set about gathering more samples, a lot more. Today the company has partners in 26 countries doing almost exactly the same thing, scooping up soil, seawater, moss, or yes, poo. And then either on location or back here in London, they harvest the genetic data of microbes in each sample and upload them into a huge new database.

11:05Half of all data that we as humans have on life is from about 12 species. So that will be humans, mice, rabbits, E. coli, maybe salmon, a few other sort of model organisms that scientists study all of the time. And what we're effectively saying is, hey, look, you know, 99.99999 % of tree of life is outside of those 12 species, yet it represents less than half the data we have. And so Basecamp's mission fundamentally is to go and represent the rest of the tree of life fairly as it is represented in life. So far, they've catalogued 9.8 billion new protein sequences and discovered a million new species.

11:47If we start with that data gap that we were describing earlier, the most fundamental thing we've done is fill as much of that in as we can. And so with the investments that we've had up to this date to$85 million, we've been able to now grow the single largest database of life on Earth, genetics of life on Earth. But that's not the end of it. Now that they have so much new information, they need to work out how to use it. And that's where artificial intelligence comes in. Using AI in biology is one of the few domains of science where it can really be transformational for us because the complexity of what's out there is so vast relative to our ability as humans to comprehend it.

12:29The idea is that all this new data could help the AI learn more about life at the genetic level and then put all of that learning together to create something new. They're using foundational AI models. It's a bit like ChatGBT for biology, in that the computers will take in vast amounts of data and then use that to solve complex, real-world problems. What we're doing effectively is giving artificial intelligence a background understanding of how biology works, and it's using that background intelligence to solve these problems. There's that point that you don't know what you don't know. That's the craziest thing here.

13:05We don't even know what the right questions you ask are because we've never seen life like this. I mean, I would challenge that. I think we do know, as humans, the problems we want to solve. Every single scientist can immediately tell you what they're trying to do, what they're trying to solve. We know what we want to do. We just don't know how to do it most of the time. And that's really that step change that's happened in the last few years in the field of AI, from our perspective, that these very, very broad models at a foundational level, if they have the right training data, start to be very good at a mind-bogglingly wide array of tasks.

13:39So what in theory could it do? Well, things like breaking down plastics in the ocean. We should be able to design enzyme cell systems that can degrade any plastic we want. Or to create crops to feed people. You could ask it to design you a wheat genome that is resistant to drought. Or even design a new treatment for cancer. What we're talking about here is the ability to programmably rewrite DNA. You would basically go and you'd study the mutations, you'd look at what edits were needed to the immune system to help the immune system recognise the cancer. We're on our road to curative treatments for any cancer for any patient.

14:19The idea is still new, and there would be enormous practical challenges which no one knows how to solve yet before there are treatments. But Oliver and Glenn believe that their AI, supported by the data they're feeding it, can achieve things no human can. very simply humans do not understand enough about life on earth every single advance in human society pretty much has been about understanding more about nature our modern medicines have all come from understanding more about nature things like antibiotics and we see this as the next evolution of this we could understand the vast majority of earth that remains undiscovered we could develop better medicines better products and a more sustainable future

15:04So data then is power. What Glenn and Oliver have in their hands could save lives. They're breaking new ground. Technology has made it possible and affordable to collect genetic data at scale. And now AI can use that data to create new products, even new biology. You can see then why they're attracting interest and tens of millions of dollars of funding. What will happen next is a race between them and others to gather more information as quickly as possible, a new scramble for nature's data. But what about the places where that race plays out? Of course, many parts of the world with the greatest biodiversity are in low - and middle-income countries, often with a history of being exploited for their natural resources.

15:54Is it fair that a British company can take ownership of data from thousands of miles away? and profit from it. So this is about 500 metres from the previous point we can collect here. What do people in Cameroon get from the deal? Air temperature 25.1, soy pH 6.7. Back to those researchers we heard at the start from Cameroon's University of Bouye, a partner of Basecamp. They're working in the southwest region gathering samples and they've recorded their trip for us. Base camps say they've worked hard to build partnerships with the government and the local community.

16:46They're working in collaboration with people here who help to guide them to local nature sites. The project leader from Buya University is Professor Eric Fokum. We understand clearly that a lot of the biodiversity of the world is still being hosted on territories that belong to the indigenous and local communities, yet they are the least beneficiaries of the various benefits derived from there. This community will receive payments up front and then royalties from any commercial products generated using this data. Right from the initial stages, the community will start getting some benefits. At another level, subsequently, after the material has been obtained, and if there are third parties who want to make use of those materials, then they can pay to access some of them.

17:46And the algorithm will still enable that some of the payments trickle down to the community as per the agreements that were eventually obtained. Basecamp wouldn't tell us exactly how much they're paying to the local community in Cameroon, but they say their royalties are about 10 times higher than international agreements recommend. When the payments were negotiated, the community were invited to bring advisors, including lawyers and researchers. My hope is that products will be discovered from these genetic resources, that will better the lives of the world, maybe at large, but in a way that will be fair and we will not need to fight to be able to get access to some of the resources that will be generated from all this work.

18:35And the people around Cameroon and elsewhere are looking up to us because someday they will tell us you were representing us in that process. What did you do?

18:52I want to understand if they're really doing all they can. So I contact an expert who's a veteran of international negotiations over nature. My name is Dr. Shiva Tambishetti. I'm an associate professor of intellectual property law at the London School of Economics. She knows of Basecamp Research and companies like it. I do think that what they're doing is a departure of sorts, both in terms of scientific protocol and, I think, existing legal regimes. She wants to see communities receive as much as they can in return for protecting their local nature. And so she says a fair model should offer not just royalties for many products that arise from the database, but a share of the value of the database itself.

19:41We know data is very valuable, particularly data of the form that Basecamp has and is able to use is extremely valuable. I think the value of data lies in its form as data, as aggregated, accumulated points of data. And that is something I think Basecamp understands really, really well. And therefore, to then go back to product revenues and individual products is important. has to be part of the story. But we also need to find a way to value digital sequence information as data. Basecamp says it's taking account of that by making sure its system can track whenever a DNA sequence is used, even by its AI models, and sharing out the payments accordingly.

20:24But there's another challenge. Dr. Tambasetti disagrees with Basecamp's model of keeping its database private. Digital sequence information in publicly available databases is incredibly important for science and technology. It's incredibly important for innovation, how you do things. But these databases are not openly available. They're taking biodiversity, converting it into digital biodiversity, and then putting it straight into enclosures where it is not accessible to scientists. The result of it is a net minus, I think, for scientists, because they no longer have access to this diversity that Basecamp then holds as proprietary information, as proprietary databases.

21:11So longer term, you have to ask yourself, whose interests does Basecamp research serve? I think more can be done to reassure people that this is in the interest and in the progress of open science and will allow technology to develop. Openly available databases allow a thousand flowers to bloom.

21:35Basecamp says it does give access to some scientists and that it's exponentially increasing the amount of data available to scientific discovery by proving that there's a business case for preserving biodiversity.

21:51This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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