Has a company really discovered a million new species?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have a million new species just been discovered?
That’s the claim made by Dr Oliver Vince, co-founder of a company called Basecamp Research, who are collecting genetic data to train AI systems. The hope is that they’ll be able to use this to discover new medicines.
But is this number a good one? Rob Finn, from the European Bioinformatics Institute, explains what is being counted and how you go about counting them.
Credits: Presenter and producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Dave O’Neill Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:06.0 | Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:09.7 | With the programme that looks at the numbers in the news, in life, and in DNA databases, |
| 0:14.9 | I'm Tom Coles. |
| 0:20.1 | How many new species are out there waiting to be discovered? |
| 0:24.3 | Quite a few, according to a claim that loyal listener Vivian heard in a BBC interview and wanted |
| 0:29.5 | us to look into. |
| 0:30.8 | Here's Dr Oliver Vince, co-founder of a company called Basecamp Research, speaking to the Today |
| 0:35.9 | programme. |
| 0:37.1 | Far more than 99% of life on Earth is completely unknown. |
| 0:41.4 | And so Basecamp set out to change this. |
| 0:43.6 | We've built partnerships in 28 countries, 150 different locations. |
| 0:48.0 | It is the rainforest, the Arctic, volcanoes, under the ocean, |
| 0:52.8 | to basically look for the rest of the species. So far, we've |
| 0:56.8 | discovered over a million new species. A million new species. That does sound exciting. It also |
| 1:04.1 | sounds like an awfully big number. Can it really be right? So my name's Rob Finn. I work at the European Biopharmatics Institute. |
| 1:14.2 | We are the custodiums of the world's biological data, so we try and gather it all up and |
| 1:20.8 | put it into databases and then make it freely available for the scientific community to |
| 1:26.4 | use in their research. |
| 1:28.0 | Although they do things in a different way and not-for-profit, |
| 1:31.6 | Rob's databases are similar to the one being created by Basecamp Research. |
| 1:35.6 | So he knows what this claim is all about. |
... |
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