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A growing number of bioethicists, policy-makers, legal scholars, patient groups, and other critically involved parties in North America and Europe recently have started calling for a new ethical principle to gather participants into clinical and genetics research. While long-prevailing regimes of consent have held that people participate in the research process out of `altruism' (and hence do not merit more than nominal payment for their participation), the increasingly visible profits accruing to bioscience researchers, companies, and universities suggest that this research contract is producing a stark asymmetry. A move is afoot, therefore, to develop a principle of benefit-sharing through which to guarantee some form of returns to research subjects. This paper tracks some of the implications of the rise of this new ethic, tracing its travels from the world of bioprospecting to clinical and genetics research, and exploring how and why benefit-sharing matters to Latourian notions of science as politics. What might it mean, both for bioscience and for our ideas about politics and publics more generally, to think of research not just as a mode of ‘speaking for’, in Latourian terms, but as a mode of giving back? I argue that in shifting the problem from one of dialogue to one of distribution, benefit-sharing proposals are also implicated in the constitution of the biosciences' publics in new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses European bioprospecting activities in early modern West Central Africa. It argues that, since the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were interested in local medical practices and Angolan medicinals. Early modern Europeans valued indigenous African knowledge and the Portuguese pondered upon the commercial potential of African drugs. The exotic medicines and dyestuffs were marketed locally but also exported to Brazil and Europe. Traders, military officers, and missionaries can be identified as the major agents in collecting and spreading knowledge about Angolan natural medicine. By the end of the eighteenth century, trained naturalists sought to systematize botanical knowledge in the Portuguese colonial world, including Angola. Similar to what happened in other parts of the Portuguese overseas empire, Europeans learned and borrowed eagerly from the indigenous medical knowledge in West Central Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The planetary importance of microbial function requires urgently that our knowledge and our exploitation ability is extended, therefore every occasion of bioprospecting is welcome. In this work, bioprospecting is presented from the perspective of the UMBRELLA project, whose main goal was to develop an integral approach for remediation of soil influenced by mining activity, by using microorganisms in association with plants. Accordingly, this work relies on the cultivable fraction of microbial biodiversity, native to six mining sites across Europe, different for geographical, climatic and geochemical characteristics but similar for suffering from chronic stress. The comparative analysis of the soil functional diversity, resulting from the metabolic profiling at community level (BIOLOG ECOPlates) and confirmed by the multivariate analysis, separates the six soils in two clusters, identifying soils characterised by low functional diversity and low metabolic activity. The microbial biodiversity falls into four major bacterial phyla: Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes, including a total of 47 genera and 99 species. In each soil, despite harsh conditions, metabolic capacity of nitrogen fixation and plant growth promotion were quite widespread, and most of the strains showed multiple resistances to heavy metals. At species-level, Shannon's index (alpha diversity) and Sørensen's Similarity (beta diversity) indicates the sites are indeed diverse. Multivariate analysis of soil chemical factors and biodiversity identifies for each soil well-discriminating chemical factors and species, supporting the assumption that cultured biodiversity from the six mining sites presents, at phylum level, a convergence correlated to soil factors rather than to geographical factors while, at species level, reflects a remarkable local characterisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of pharmaceutical chemistry in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century dovetailed with the wars of imperial expansion in Africa. The drug strophanthin joined the official roster of the British Pharmacopoeia in 1898; meanwhile, British troops were the target of poisoned arrows on the Gold Coast. This article argues for a global history of drug discovery through the case of strophanthin in colonial West Africa. The drug's key ingredient, the seeds of various Strophanthus species, also critical to poison arrow manufacture, was at the centre of power struggles between colonial administrators and communities in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Colony and Togoland throughout the 1920s. In 1885, Africans had control of their land and unrestricted access to Strophanthus and other plants. By 1905, a British military presence had been established and poisoned arrows were outlawed. Simultaneously, breakthroughs in pharmaceutical chemistry increased international demand for Strophanthus seeds, prompting an unsuccessful export scheme from the Gold Coast during the First World War. Reading narratives of drug discovery in Europe against colonial politics in West Africa reveals the world history in which pharmaceuticals continue to be embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]