For most of scientific history, a researcher could collect a plant, a microbe or a tissue sample in one country, carry it home, and build a career or a product on it without owing anything to the place it came from. That assumption — that the genetic wealth of the world was a free resource for whoever reached it first — came to be seen as a form of injustice, often described as biopiracy when it left the source country and its communities with nothing. International law has spent three decades trying to put something fairer in its place, and that effort is now being tested by a deeply modern problem: what happens when the valuable thing is not the physical sample at all, but its digital genetic sequence. These questions sit within the Indigenous data and CARE domain of the CASRAI Dictionary, because they bear directly on how communities’ resources and knowledge are governed.
The Convention and the Nagoya Protocol
The framework begins with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the international treaty that, among other aims, established that countries have sovereign rights over their own genetic resources — these are not a global commons free for the taking. Building on that principle, the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing set out the practical rules. Its logic rests on two pillars. The first is access: a researcher wishing to use a country’s genetic resources should obtain prior informed consent from that country before doing so. The second is benefit-sharing: the benefits that arise from using those resources — whether monetary, such as a share of profits, or non-monetary, such as training, collaboration, technology transfer or shared research results — should be shared fairly with the provider, on mutually agreed terms. The shorthand “ABC” — access and benefit-sharing — captures the deal: consent before use, and fairness in what follows.
Traditional knowledge and genetic resources
The Protocol does not stop at the biological material. It explicitly recognises traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources — the knowledge that Indigenous peoples and local communities hold about the properties and uses of plants, animals and ecosystems, knowledge that has often guided researchers straight to a useful compound or organism. Where such knowledge is used, the Protocol expects that the communities holding it give their consent and share in the benefits, just as a providing country does for the physical resource. This recognition matters enormously. It acknowledges that a community’s long-accumulated understanding of the living world is a genuine contribution with real value, not a free clue to be exploited, and it gives that knowledge a place in international law rather than treating it as folklore in the public domain.
The Digital Sequence Information problem
The hard question of the present day is Digital Sequence Information (DSI). When a genetic resource is sequenced, its information — the genetic code — can be recorded digitally, uploaded to a database, and used by anyone, anywhere, without anyone ever touching the original physical sample again. This breaks the logic that the original system assumed. The Nagoya Protocol was built around access to physical resources: you asked permission to take the sample. But if all the scientifically useful value now lives in a sequence that has been published in an open database, a researcher can use that value without ever requesting access to anything, and the source country and community may again be left with nothing. The benefit-sharing bargain risks being quietly bypassed by digitisation. This is not a hypothetical worry; it strikes at whether the entire ABS framework can survive in genomic science.
Why the debate is genuinely difficult
What makes DSI so contested is that two important goods pull in opposite directions:
- Open data. The free, open sharing of genetic sequence data has been a foundation of modern biology — it accelerates research, underpins medicine and conservation, and is something the scientific community rightly values deeply.
- Fair benefit-sharing. The principle that those who provide the resources and knowledge underlying that data deserve a fair share of the benefits is equally a matter of justice.
A crude solution that locked down sequence data would protect benefit-sharing at the cost of crippling open science; a free-for-all would protect open science at the cost of justice. The international response has therefore moved towards multilateral mechanisms — arrangements that decouple benefit-sharing from each individual act of access, so that benefits can flow to providers collectively (for example through a shared fund) while sequence data remains broadly open. Designing such a mechanism so that it is fair, workable and does not strangle research is one of the genuinely open problems of contemporary science policy.
Where CARE comes in
This is also where the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics — speak directly. CARE was articulated precisely because the prevailing data ethic, focused on making data open and reusable, did not on its own protect the rights and interests of the peoples that data concerns or derives from. DSI is a textbook case: data that is technically open can still carry obligations to the communities and countries from which it ultimately came. CARE provides the ethical grounding for insisting that openness and obligation can coexist — that making sequence data reusable does not extinguish the duty to share its benefits or to respect the authority of those it implicates. The way CARE sits alongside the FAIR principles, rather than against them, is explored further in our wider material on data governance fundamentals.
A consistent vocabulary for resources and rights
For consent, provenance and benefit-sharing terms to be tracked across collections, databases and borders, they must be described consistently — or a sample’s origin and the conditions attached to its use will be lost the moment it moves between systems. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary works towards: a shared vocabulary so that the governance information attached to genetic resources and associated knowledge is understood the same way wherever it appears. And because describing, sequencing and stewarding these resources is genuine research contribution, the work can be recorded using the same framework as any other — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. The Nagoya Protocol established that genetic wealth comes with obligations; the DSI debate is the test of whether those obligations can be honoured in a digital, open-data world.