This document discusses bioprospecting and the ethical concerns it raises. It notes that governments and legal bodies need to quickly reach agreements on commercializing biological products to avoid hindering research. It also says officials responsible for bioprospecting paperwork may lack experience. The document discusses fiscal incentives and laws related to bioprospecting, including intellectual property rights and benefit sharing requirements. It examines bioprospecting non-governmental organizations and their role in transnational governance.

1. Bioprospecting and Ethical
Concerns
BY SREEREMYA
FACULTY OF BIOLOGY

2. • INTRODUCTION
• There are certain cases in the field of bioprospecting which have
made quite an outbreak to commercialize ceratain biological
products. Government and legal bodies, if they make dealy in
reaching agreements can put an end to research after promising
compounds or their derivatives have been synthesized. It is also
possible that many government agencies like the customs and
public health officials responsible for overseeing and processing
forms and documents linked to bioprospecting could be seeing
them for the prime time and hence lack the experience needed to
handle such paperwork . In such cases political will needs to be
directed towards orienting, arraying and training concerned officials
in matters related to bioprospecting activities(Andrioli et al.,2004).

3. • Fiscal incentives– creating special tax-relief
measures for companies which are mainly
involved in bioprospecting could be an
attractive incentive for users. This could
mainly include tax exemptions on the import
of equipment and other technological
components by a company wishing to
undertake research on biomaterial in
partnership with local institutions within the
provider country (Bhattacharya et al., 2010).

4. • LAWS INVOLVED IN BIOPROSPECTING
• Intellectual Property Rights, New
Governmentalities-Michel Foucault's concept of
governmentality has had an aggrandizing
influence on comparative inquiry into political
economy in past decades (Braga et al., 2016).
"Governmentality" represents the ramified types
of power, in various forms, that are exerted over
populations and that create regulations between
people and things in order to establish security
within and outside of the state.

5. • Up until at least World War II, the primary
agency of governmentality was located in the
state, in both national and international
contexts. In the past two decades, a new
agency has come on the scene: the non-
governmental organization (NGO), principally
an extra-statal and extra- national institution
(Costa et al., 2012).

6. • The emergence of order of transnational artifacts and
forces that have coalesced into a type of NGO of
particular contemporary saliency and dynamism: the
bioprospecting NGO. Bioprospecting is mainly the
search for biological, chemical, and genetic material (in
the form of plants, microbes, insects, etc.) that may
prove to be effective for future pharmaceutical
products. Bioprospecting NGOs are paving a way for
pathbreaking phase because they bring together an
organizationally effective apparatus, conceptual and
legal regimes, public capital, private capital, and
political interests of an inherently transnational scope.

7. • KEY CRITERIA OF BIOPROSPECTING Benefit-sharing—is
a pseudo-legal concept designed to compensate
marginalized and indigenous people and communities
mainly for their intellectual contributions to large and
wealthy public or private organizations' bioprospecting
endeavors.
• In a certain cases, large institutions "wield enormously
disproportionate access to resources, information,
technology and capital that the benefits of
bioprospecting overwhelmingly apply to them and not
to the nation-states in which prospecting occurs, and
especially not to the communities where prospecting
takes place" ..

8. • There are arguements that benefit sharing mainly
emerges out of development paradigms in which
market-driven forces mainly advocated as more
favourable avenues to community development as
opposed to traditional development aid policies and
practices(Conti et al., 2016). Benefit sharing, as a
development practice, is an pivotal and instructive
example of the sorts of policies that are likely to shape
transnational governmentality in decades to come. It is
very much evident from such a search an initial search
that more bioprospecting is actually taking place, a
finding supported by observations of scientists active in
Antarctica(Chaverri et al., 2015).

9. • Determining the exact extent of such activities, the commercial
value, and likely trends will require more active surveying of the
relevant activities in Antarctica, the sectors using genetic material
from Antarctica, major research programmes most directly
involved, and records of the appropriate patent
offices(Christian,2004). So far, bioprospecting activities in Antarctica
have been carried out by certain universities, research centres, and
biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, such as the
University of Bordeaux (France), the Australian Academy of
Technological Sciences and Engineering, Genencor International
(multinational), and Merck Sharp & Dohme (multinational)( Chapla
et al., 2014). Bioprospecting activities in Antarctica tend to be
carried out by consortia comprising a mixture of public and private
bodies, making it difficult to draw a clear distinction between
scientific research and commercial activities

10. • Journal of Bio-Medical & Instrumentation
Engineering, Bio prospecting and Ethical
Concerns, S. Sreeremya,2018.Vol:3(2).1-8