How many butterflies are worth an elephant?

The question poised by a consultant during a conversation, that would offend an lepidopterologist, is the key to answer another question: how do we fund more biodiversity molecular research?

That is the conversation I had with Joe Lopez from the Global Invertebrate Genome Alliance – GIGA, whose global meeting starts next week.

Most of the biodiversity is in the global south, but the belief that accessing biodiversity will solve the problems of the global south has been proven, to put nicely, difficult to validate.

With my entrepreneurial experience, my first thoughts are that large genomes may not directly address Global South issues (poverty) and we may fall into the trap of having a solution in search of a problem. In my experience trying to raise funds to make genomes in/for Brazil, investors lose interest when they see the long and expensive time-to-market from a genome to a solution/technology.

We’ve secured funding for some projects, like the golden mussel and sun coral, but not for many others, including the Lionfish. This leads to a collection of ‘one-off’ genomes, that I’m not sure are very useful.

We were discussing how GIGA could support researchers in the south to go after genomes. GIGA is a valuable network for resource sharing and collaboration, but my experience also is that transitioning from potential to opportunities is not frictionless. For example, I’m in (desperate) need of computer infrastructure for a large seaweed genome project, but I wouldn’t know where to start with GIGA (other than asking him). But AWS, GCloud and others, though costly, offer a clear and easy solution. In the end, the transactional cost of free services can outweigh paid ones.

The challenges of GIGA’s members are similar to the challenges of Biodiversity research itself:

How do we create consensus on priorities when we lack a good metric to compare species’ ‘value’?

In a world of limited resources in which you may have to chose one to sequence, this lack of consensus could lead to the investment going to another sector, such as AI, and we end up with no genomes sequenced.

This difference of opinion applies not only to species but also to projects itself. I believe some questions that are catchy, like the link between biodiversity and the next pandemic, are impossible to answer scientifically and provide actionable data. This disagreement makes joint efforts more challenging.

As Wil McLelan said, “opportunity travels twice as fast as goodwill.” Scientists should focus on what’s important (to a larger audience) rather than just what’s interesting (to them).

Some genomes are more interesting than others, but they are not necessarily the important ones.

Will we be able to reach consensus?