July 12, 2004

Dear Sir,

The article that appeared in on Friday July 9, 2004 entitled 'Preventing biological piracy in Bermuda waters' was highly inaccurate and was based on a re-hash of an inaccurate story about bioprospecting in Bermuda which appeared in 'Nature' magazine four weeks ago.

The Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR) was not given the opportunity to comment or supply the correct information for article since the reporter left a message for me after working hours on Thursday evening and I returned the call 8.15 on Friday morning, not realising the story had already been printed. Neither was any attempt made to contact me or BBSR's media officer at home. The only conclusion I can draw is that your reporter did not want the facts to get in the way of trying to create a sensational story.

There was no urgency in publishing the article in on Friday other than to avoid allowing BBSR the opportunity to set the record straight. The issues touched upon in article are complicated and hard to comprehend and I think it is a disgrace that Bermuda's daily newspaper did not even attempt to get the whole story straight prior to publishing. BBSR and the Government have had an ongoing dialogue on bioprospecting as the following letter indicates.

'Nature' has agreed to publish this letter, which will appear in the journal soon.

The article in made the same mistake as the article in 'Nature'; you mixed bioprospecting with scientific discovery. BBSR operates the longest record of ocean measurements in the world, Hydrostation S. Our Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study site (BATS) 80 km southeast of the island is the most studied site in the world's oceans. We know more about this part of the ocean than any area in the world other than our sister site in Hawaii. We are trying to understand how the ocean works regarding the regulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and have to study all aspects of the ocean.

From time to time new tools emerge for us to do our job better. Twelve years ago, Dr. Steven Giovannoni (Oregon State University) used new DNA methods to isolate a bacteria called SAR 11 (SAR for Sargasso Sea). This organism was thought to be one of the most abundant bacteria on the planet about: 600,000 cells per millilitre of seawater.

In 2002, we teamed up with Dr. Craig Venter, who had sequenced the human genome, and he had an interest in applying whole genome shotgun sequencing to our time-series station samples to help determine the species diversity at BATS. We took three 50-gallon samples in February 2003 and one in May 2003. The seawater was filtered and sequenced. The results were astounding and were published in 'Science' magazine two months ago. Already this paper has been heralded as an incredible dataset of diversity in the ocean. There were approximately 250,000 known genes in the environment prior to this study. We found over 1.2 million more! We found the parts list for 1,800 to 47,000 new species. We also found 790 new light-harvesting proteins. Only 200 had been known to date, globally. We published these data in the open literature so they are available for all ? the global good. One cannot patent a sequence so no revenue was lost from Bermuda as it was not there in the first place. Also seawater moves quite fast off Bermuda. This water had collected bacteria from many Exclusive Economic Zones of many countries in the world and had probably picked up bacteria from many places it had been. This water may have in Bermuda's Exclusive Economic Zone for five days and out in the next five days. Ownership of such material is a difficult and complicated issue and we are working with the Bermuda Government representatives to determine the best practice. Many other countries are dealing with similar issues. The United States, for example, does not claim any value or collect revenue from its marine genetic resources. Science, though, has to continue and new tools have to be employed to understand the oceanic system. As each one of the water samples we studied was so different ? even 20 km apart ? we believe that the diversity of the open ocean is huge and there are millions more genes that have not been discovered. We have only scratched the surface and without these studies we would never know this.

Regarding the issue of benefit sharing, we received a milestone payment of $1,645 for a product derived from a discovery in Bermuda. BBSR, not Diversa as indicated in your article, set up a fund to benefit Bermuda's students in order to pay for DNA sequencing chemicals. We continue to talk to the Bermuda Government officials about equitable benefit sharing, making sure that everyone benefits as per the letter to be published in Nature.