Archivio antropologico mediterraneo

Anno XXVI, n. 25 (1) | 2023

Dossier monografici e Miscellanea

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 and Erica Borg

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/aam/6994
DOI: 10.4000/aam.6994
ISSN: 2038-3215

Publisher
Dipartimento Culture e Società - Università di Palermo

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Amedeo Policante and 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 since 24 June 2023, connection on 27 December 2023. URL: http://
journals.openedition.org/aam/6994 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/aam.6994

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 Mining the Ocean Genome: Global Bioprospecting Expeditions and Genomic Extrac... 1

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 and Erica Borg

1 The 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.

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 Mining the Ocean Genome: Global Bioprospecting Expeditions and Genomic Extrac... 2

2 In 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?
3 In 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.
4 Looking 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

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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).
5 We 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).
6 This 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
7 Since 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

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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.
8 In 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).
9 Since 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).
10 Amyris’ 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

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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).
11 In 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.
12 The 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).
13 The 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

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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).
14 However, 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.
15 Moreover, 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).
16 Our 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

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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
17 The 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).
18 The 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

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(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.
19 The 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).
20 In 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).
21 Additionally, 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

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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).
22 While 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.
23 Despite 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).

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24 It 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.
25 The 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).
26 Bioprospecting 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).
27 As 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

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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
28 According 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).
29 The 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).

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30 PCR 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).
31 Bioprospecting 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).
32 It 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

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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).
33 As 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).
34 The 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).
35 The 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

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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).
36 Second, 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).
37 Ultimately, 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

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genome that is gradually impoverished by processes of extinction and biodiversity loss

(Waterton 2013: 1-19).
38 This 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
39 As 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.
40 The 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.
41 In 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

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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.
42 Paradoxically, 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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NOTES
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.

ABSTRACTS
The article follows the ongoing transformation of genomic science into an industry – dedicated
to the systematic extraction, abstraction and manipulation of genetic material – and considers
the new types of oceanic exploration that genomic research both presupposes and fosters. We
argue that emergent practices of ocean bioprospecting are sparking new ways of thinking, living
and exploiting marine ecosystems as «genomic mines». We chart the recent history of genomic
bioprospecting operations in the global ocean – focusing on the Sorcerer II expedition (2004-2006)
and the Tara Oceans project (2009-2013) – and recount the rise of the «ocean genome» as an
object of knowledge and a target of extractivist practices. Finally, we theorize the peculiar global
mobility of bioprospecting vessels as constituting a practice of social construction of the ocean: a
peculiar form of scientific navigation, which is already engendering new social uses of marine
biodiversity, new strategies of capital accumulation, as well as innovative representations of
ocean ecosystems.

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 Mining the Ocean Genome: Global Bioprospecting Expeditions and Genomic Extrac... 22

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.

INDEX
Keywords: biotechnologies, political ecology, genomics, extractivism, oceanic explorations
Parole chiave: biotecnologie, ecologia politica, estrattivismo, genomica, esplorazioni oceaniche

AUTHORS
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

Archivio antropologico mediterraneo, Anno XXVI, n. 25 (1) | 2023