Controlling nature's data

驾驭自然之数据

The Documentary Podcast

2025-07-31

26 分钟
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Could AI cure cancer using nature's DNA? A London tech firm, Basecamp Research, harvests genetic information from organisms and microbes around the world. Its genome database - the world's biggest - will help supercomputers to create new products, from detergents to medicines. It's a bewildering new frontier, and it comes with big questions: who should own this valuable information? Who should benefit? And what could it unleash?
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  • BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

  • How much do you know about the world around you?

  • About the soil, the rivers, the tree roots?

  • Look closer.

  • What lives in each tiny millimetre?

  • And then closer still through a microscope at the billions or trillions of microbes,

  • fungi, bacteria.

  • At this level, life is still largely unexplored.

  • What if something there, in the soil beneath your feet, could lead to a cure for cancer?

  • Among the forests of southwest Cameroon in the community of Ngompen,

  • a team of researchers has arrived with backpacks of scientific instruments.

  • I think our equipment are all ready.

  • Let's set our equipment.

  • They crouch down, overlooked by tall trees, over a patch of orange sandy ground.

  • Good.

  • So can we do some digging?

  • They're digging up small scoops of soil, seemingly at random.

  • Let me pick some of the soil sample.

  • What they need is something none of us can see.

  • Genetic information.