concept

Bioprospecting

Searching the living world for molecules that might become drugs, pesticides, or industrial enzymes. The initial intuition is appealing: rainforests and reefs are vast chemical libraries, so protecting biodiversity should pay for itself through pharmaceutical discovery. The economics say otherwise. Because the probability that any one species yields a successful compound is tiny, and because different species frequently yield redundant structures, the marginal economic value of keeping one more unscreened species is close to zero. The 1991 Merck–INBio agreement, with ten thousand samples, tested that: after a decade, no commercial drugs. Biodiversity is worth protecting, but for other reasons.