Community Autonomy and the Maya ICBG Project in Chiapas, Mexico: How a Bioprospecting Project that Should Have Succeeded Failed

Human Organization, Winter 2004 by Berlin, Brent, Berlin, Elois Ann

Associate Program 1: Drug Discovery and Pharmaceutical Development

Researchers in Associate Program (AP) 1 would develop an advanced laboratory for carrying out preliminary screening of extracts of vascular plants at ECOSUR, our host institution.9 Plant extracts were to have been produced from a prioritized set of species selected by researchers in AP 2, Medical Ethnobiology and Botanical Inventory, on the basis of their medicinal importance as inferred from informant consensus concerning use and general availability. The hypothesis on which this operational selection procedure for initial screening was based assumes that: "The greater the degree of consensus [among native collaborators] regarding the use of a plant based therapy, the greater the likelihood that the remedy in question [will be] physiologically active or effective" (Trotter and Logan 1986:93). Further, we argued that the species that comprised an herbally based ethnomedical system must be commonly known, widely available, and easily accessible if such a system is to continue to function effectively. It follows, therefore, that those common and well-known species used in the treatment of the regularly occurring illnesses will have been selected on the basis of their pharmacological effects and are likely to show high levels of bioactivity and should form the first set of species to be evaluated pharmacologically.

Infrastructure Development and Technology Transfer

Preliminary to initiation of natural products research, infrastructure enhancement of ECOSUR's laboratories was necessary. This critical step was based on the view that an infrastructure necessary to support modern natural products research must be developed in the host country. The Maya ICBG concurred fully with Asebey and Chapela's assessment that we must:

invert the current model for natural products drug discovery... [that] take raw materials from the developing world and ship them to the developed world where the necessary technology and capital to exploit these resources exist (the "resource extraction" model). Conversely, [we should] take the capital and state-of-the-art technology to countries rich in biological diversity (Asebey 1996:57; see also Chapela 1996; Feinsilver and Chapela 1996).

We had taken initial steps to implement this model. With financial support from NIH and the University of Georgia Research Foundation (UGARF), and in consultation with scientists at UGA and MNL, our collaborators at ECOSUR began upgrading their laboratory facilities. We planned to make the new laboratory capable of carrying out all preliminary natural products evaluations except extensive fractionations, a step requiring high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) capabilities that were to be added in the third year of the grant period. High interest compounds (prioritized on bioassay results from ECOSUR, UGA, and MNL) would be purified on site. When functioning at full capacity, ECOSUR would have had the capability to process, fractionate, and bioassay extracts of the vascular flora that would have been equivalent to the capacities of a modern natural products research laboratory.