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The Documentary Podcast

Controlling nature's data

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.32.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

0:08.3

How much do you know about the world around you?

0:11.7

About the soil, the rivers, the tree roots.

0:15.4

Look closer.

0:17.9

What lives in each tiny millimeter?

0:21.6

And then closer still, through microscope at the billions or trillions of microbes, fungi, bacteria.

0:30.4

At this level, life is still largely unexplored.

0:35.2

What if something there, in the soil beneath your feet,

0:39.1

would lead to a cure for cancer?

0:44.8

Among the forests of southwest Cameroon,

0:47.2

in the community of Ngonpem,

0:48.9

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

0:56.6

I think our equipment are already.

0:59.6

Let's set our equipment.

1:01.2

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

1:06.1

Good. So can we do some digging?

1:11.3

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

1:15.6

Let me pick some of the soy sample.

1:19.2

What they need is something none of us can see.

1:22.5

Genetic information.

1:24.0

That's good enough.

1:25.2

Yes.

...

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