Preservation of biodiversity depends on the interaction of natural systems with human systems. Conservation in modern times typically relies on public authority, often ultimately on public ownership. But who is the public? Ranchers, foresters and miners in the American West contest the claims of Washington, D.C. and federal agencies, often in violent ways. "Indigenous peoples" in poor nations contest national parks and protected areas. The genomics revolution makes possible ownership of nature on a much smaller scale -- beginning with genes. Ownership of the "building blocks of life" is hotly debated globally, and increasingly in the United States as well -- a nation with a very strong property regime. It is crucial that social and policy scientists understand the technical implications of this transformation, just as scientists need to examine implications of the evolving property systems that affect both access to nature and the incentive structure surrounding inventions.

Conflicts over ownerships in large landscapes are pervasive in history as in contemporary times. The results of conflicts are frequently inimical to both conservation and development. As the possible scale of ownership grows smaller with genomics, disputes move from landscapes to cells. Strong property-rights regimes are conventionally considered the sine qua non condition for innovation. The classic case is pharmaceutical,where lucrative "hits" are rare and development and testing costs very high. Patents on both process innovations and end products are seen as necessary to spur investment. Yet is it possible that in fields of rapidly changing technology, conventional theory is turned on its head: strong property rights stifle innovation by increasing transaction costs. The common analogy is to words in literature: surely one cannot establish intellectual property rights in the individual words used by a novelist, but it seems right that the paragraphs are worthy of protection. Perhaps even the sentences. But what if the sentences are derived from folk proverbs, street slang, remembered conversations -- so tangled over time that it is difficult to tell where innovation starts and heritage stops. Patenting of words would quickly put a halt to much creative work in literature.

In the field of transgenic crops, who is to own products built on generations of human experimentation and hard-won knowledge? What institutional arrangements are capable of ensuring benefit-sharing sufficient both to maintain the natural base and to facilitate continued research? What local, national and global institutions can provide authoritative knowledge about the safety and risks of bioengineering? Failure to resolve these controversies threatens to deny benefits of the biological revolution to people in both rich and poor countries.

The list of medical and agricultural discoveries is large and growing rapidly, as are the sources of resistance and unanticipated consequences. Wild biota have contributes significantly to innovation by providing insights and specimen; declining biodiversity increases the urgency of conservation. The pressing practical question is the appropriate balance of public interest and distributed rights in biological resources. Existing institutional mechanisms lag both technological advances and market forces. One means of giving material value to protection of biodiversity is through "bioprospecting" agreements in which firms pay upfront costs for access to wild biota and agree to share profits from any commercialized discoveries. The first such agreement was brokered by Cornell. These same arrangements are criticized as “biopiracy” in the mounting protest against globalization.

Biopiracy

Biological materials have been moving around the globe for centuries; theft was not uncommon as a mode of acquisition. "Biopiracy" now refers to a form of neo-colonialism in which the biological riches of the South are appropriated without adequate compensation by vectors of the North. Ironically, one of the most lucrative recent cases of biopiracy did not move from South to North, but from North to North. The PCR invention which enables efficient DNA replication was derived from a unique thermophilic microbe -- Thermus aquaticus -- obtained in Yellowstone National Park. This process entered public culture through the O.J. Simpson trial, before which few people outside laboratories had ever thought about it.

Benefits from this invention were eventually captured by a European firm (Hoffman-La Roche), which held the property rights and made well over a billion dollars from same. No benefits were returned to Yellowstone, the park service, or the people of the United States. In the wake of this loss, the Yellowstone Research Foundation entered into a bioprospecting agreement with Diversa Corporation to see if other micro-organisms of the unique thermal environment of Yellowstone might have such useful properties. The deal provided a prospecting fee upfront for the Park, and a guarantee of a share of profits should there be any. The impetus for this deal came in part from Costa Rica’s experience, through a visit by Bill Clinton and Bruce Babbitt to Costa Rica. The more distal roots were entwined with Cornell, through which the original INBio agreement with Merck in Costa Rica was crafted. Yellowstone’s benefit-sharing agreement with Diversa is now in the federal courts, challenged by environmentalists who argue that it is illegal on a number of grounds -- failure to consult the public that owns national parks, failure to conduct an environmental impact statement, and the prohibition in U.S. law of removal of any material -- even invisible material in tiny quantities -- from a national park, among others. The environmentalists have won a partial victory on one issue,lost on another, but appeals may well take years to resolve. Birth pains of a new property regime stand in the way of public-goods production.

Sustainable Development: As we look to these puzzles at Cornell University, we find ourselves linking two kinds of intellectual and practical puzzles. First: how is public authority to protect natural systems constituted, realized on the ground at various levels (from village commons to global soft-law regimes), contested and undermined by pressures of livelihood and profit? These are well-established puzzles with a vast literature and no clear solutions, as they centrally concern justice and legitimacy. Biotechnology forces reconceptualization of those traditional problematics. The second puzzle is then: How does the biological revolution alter our conventional concerns with integrity of ecological systems, distribution of rights, power and money, and improvement in people's lives? These two puzzles are joined by an overworked but persistent condensation concept: sustainable development.

Any list of serious obstacles to sustainable development will include a number of intractable problems which can -- in principle -- be solved through genetic engineering, provided adequate safeguards and means of technology transfer at reasonable cost.

Moreover, biotechnology offers significant prospects for conserving biodiversity by limiting destructive practices while obtaining higher and more stable yields on less land.

Genes conferring drought resistance, for example, might alleviate politically and developmentally crippling conflicts over water control and access which drive both small and large-scale dispute in many parts of the world. Improvements in non-commercial or subsistence crops (often termed "inferior grains" despite their nutritional characteristics) do not attract corporate research efforts but offer great potential for food security.

Pest-resistant strains can reduce damaging application of toxins that enter ground water and harm agricultural workers. Genetic engineering for nutrition can provide enhanced health to poor people -- the so-called "golden rice" with Vitamin A being a much discussed example. Gordon Conway, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, refers to this potential as a "doubly green revolution." With appropriate targeting of research and solution to property rights questions, the developmental consequences are profound but as yet little understood. What institutional developments would promote production of public goods in this field?

The genomics revolution has spawned considerable fear in the mind of the public, some justified, much self-evidently exhibiting a basic lack of information about the process and outcome. Yet the practical questions were sufficiently compelling that people from disciplines as different as law, economics, anthropology, political science and plant breeding, among others, are comfortable talking to one another at Cornell University. We have concluded, however, that three tasks are urgent if public goods in genetic engineering are to be realized: we need to “regroove” a generation of researchers used to disciplinary discourse; we need to find means of expressing our findings in a way that is comprehensible in public discourse; and we need to find means of training a new generation of students in this inherently interdisciplinary problematic.

Ronald J. Herring is John S. Knight Professor of International Relations and Professor of Government Director, The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.