Project Team

Project Goals

• Tease apart the socio-political and economic processes that turn a microbe into genomic data to be shared
• Chart the kinds of regulations that are emerging globally to regulate the sharing of genomic material across borders
• Engage communities and stakeholders to better understand how they can control and benefit from the sharing of genomic data

Project Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen many countries upload data to open-source sharing sites like GISAID. But the pandemic has also raised concerns around the geographic unevenness of this sharing, and the resulting benefits of doing so. 

For instance, many countries in the Global South have shared genomic data their scientists have gathered from SARS-CoV2-infected patients, only to have for-profit pharmaceutical companies use this information to develop vaccines sequencing countries do not have access to. And the sharing of genetic information can have negative repercussions when countries are subsequently targeted with border closures, such as happened with South Africa when the country’s scientists shared the genomic sequences for Omicron early in that variant’s lifecycle.