Stewarding the Future with Wise Ancestors – San Francisco 2025

[Music] Hello everyone. My name is Alex. I work at Wise Ancestor. Thank you for having me. Um, so today I wanted to share a bunch of thoughts about how we sequence all life on earth.

So reading the genetic book of life is very important because it improve our understanding of evolution, conservation. um we can be able also to engineer plants. Um we can maybe also bring extinct species back to life. And because we are entering the generative biology era, this scientific and technological trajectory is just the beginning. Amazing, right?

So our actions today will shape life on this planet for centuries to come. And so how do we avoid a tragedy of the common is one of my very important question I would like to ask to this audience today. So we are in a six mass extinction. I bet you all know about that a moment in planetary history where species are disappearing 100 to thousand time faster than the natural rate. So that mean that the evolving archive of life on earth is being erased.

before we can even read it. So as of today we have sequenced less than 1% of all ukarotic life. So according to the genome on the tree platform we currently know of just under two million species ranging in size from the blue well to the single cell plankton. And behind the statistics, we are missing entire ecosystems that the collapse can threaten human lives. So as you might know, um biodiversity loss can increase the risk of infectious disease.

Knowing that 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zonotic, it can affect clean air and water. It is actually affecting clean air and water. fundamental comments and the global economy is not exempt. The global economy is projected to suffer uh 2.7 trillion loss by 2030 if we continue on this trajectory.

So how we will generate and how we will make use of those data is a really important question. Are you familiar with the woolly mouse that came out just about two weeks ago? So, it's a mouse um that came out from a lab uh that has like a woolly fur. Very nice. Very very nice.

I could have this in my house actually. Um and it has like some traits uh from the mammoth. So the entire endeavor of this scientific uh endeavor is actually to revive a mammoth and to be able to actually like create the technology that will able uh and enable actually to destinct and revive some species in the future. However, uh maybe this technology can be also used to create the nice new trendy pets in the future. So how do we use those data is really a present question today and uh yeah it's nice right but maybe I think we should more focus on a usage that can actually uh be more sustainable and help to conserve biodiversity and preserve it and so those question about the usage uh of data generated uh by biotechnology is not new.

Uh in few like some history here in 1992 the convention on biological diversity was established to conserve and sustainably use biological diversity for the benefit of present and future generations. It was signed by 150 countries in 2010. Uh the Nagoya protocol emphasized the important of the access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their utilization 2010 Nagoya protocol. Uh but uh I would like also to highlight uh the work of Darl Posy. So uh this is a book from 1996 um entitled beyond intellectual property.

So comments and it was already like highlighting the important role actually of uh indigenous people and local communities um to manage um resources and so I will be quoting him. uh he said that western science may have coined the term nature, biodiversity and sustainability but it did not originate this concepts. Indigenous traditional and local communities have sustainably utilized and conserved a vast diversity of plant, animal and ecosystem since the dawn of human sapiions. And this is very important uh for us. the Nagagoya protocol and um this philosophy and this way of looking at how we sequence life on earth is very important uh for wise ancestor and since 2022 I've been working at wise ancestor uh to develop a new model um that is more prompt actually to um create a new ecosystem and a new approach uh more prompt to reply to the Nagagoya protocol So how this system work?

So at wise ancestor actually um we have a premise um the premise is to ensure that the result of the process are always returned to the IPLC's very important and so to do that we start um with an approach of cocreation of conservation challenges with IPLC's we create metadata that allow to attach a generated genetic sample to a community and we uh set up also an upfront benefit sharing component with them once we have the conservation challenge co-created. So we know which species we're going to sequence uh we know what is the upfront benefit sharing uh and so forth and so on. We actually going to transition to the second step of our approach um which is publishing this conservation plat uh this conservation challenge on the wise ancestor platform. The wise ancestor platform is actually a decentralized platform that enables scientists across the globe to work on those conservation challenges. So they go on this platform no matter if they are living on the other side uh of the planet they can still work with IPLC's somehow right and um yeah they can choose if uh their lab wants to sequence extract RNA etc etc so the benefit of this kind of collaborative and decentralized platform are multiple um and I had uh can we see no request access.

So we have a platform you can go on um wise ancestor and uh see if you are a scientist you can actually sign up and you can work on some conservation challenges and get paid for it. So this model actually helped to break the silos between IPLC's and the western science right um and but I think we still have some challenges that remains because we need I think a better tracking system of the data we are generating so to speak today we have an ecosystem we collaborate with this ecosystem with IPSC's we create conservation challenges. We decide about the species. We do the scientific work. The scientific work is actually tied to the ecosystem and the communities and indigenous people.

However, in the future because we are in a generative biology era, the industry are going to use and already using right those data and maybe they're going to create a lot of wealth. So how are we actually building the string between ecosystem people striding the lens and the industry using the data that are open sourced that's a very like that's a very open question and I would love uh to hear more about any technological project that can actually solve this problem uh because I think we need better tracking system of our data uh in order to create the way we can fund our comments. So if you want to take part to this challenge, if you are a technologist, a scientist or a philanthropist organization, you can reach out to us. Uh you can participate in two main ways I would say. You can take part to the uh conservation challenges.

You can fund them also. We are working on the Bermuda CEDA tree at the moment. And you can also come and talk to me if you would like to develop some technologies in order to enable better tracking of open-source genetic data. Thank you so much. [Music]