Many of us believe we are in the early days of a synthetic biology revolution which could be as big as the computer revolution. Incidentally, by changing how we

Many of us believe we are in the early days of a synthetic biology revolution which could be as big as the computer revolution. Incidentally, by changing how we think about data and its tendancy to proliferate, this would probably be a good thing for opinions on copyright law you've expressed elsewhere. And in that context the Amazon represents a treasure of potentially valuable genetics. It's really hard to quantify how valuable because the industry's not there yet, but it feels like a sunken pirate ship we can't quite salvage with the current state of the art, but have a collective interest in seeing remain where it is. Poor sanitation, endemic inequality and political strife are familiar problems. In that respect Brazil gets mentally filed somewhere between Haiti and the US, and the cost-benefit-analysis of fixing these problems feels straightforward. The cost-benefit-analysis of paying people not to farm the Amazon is not straightforward, we have no idea what the upside would be. So we imagine it's very high, but with no way to monetize that treasure today we can't find the funding... so we obsess.