While some scientists are in favor of keeping international genomic databases open, others have serious equity concerns.
Q: What’s at stake for researchers in the DSI negotiations? The power of being able to understand, through genetic sequence data, how life works at the molecular level really opens up incredible scientific opportunities. We basically have one global, open library of sequence data—the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.
Microbiologist Amber Hartman Scholz is part of a group of scientists advocating to keep international genomic databases openIn a worst-case scenario, those databases would be forced through new international law to be closed so that you’d have to pay for access. Or they would not contain all data anymore—they would only contain data from certain countries where access isn’t regulated.
What that means for the science is that our ability to solve global challenges becomes far more hampered. If researchers try to figure out how much genetic diversity is needed to save an endangered bird species in the tropics, they might have to examine sequences mainly from bird species from the global north, because the other information is caught up in databases that are not connected. It’s a thorny issue.
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