AI-driven enzyme engineering risks deepening biotech monopolies while bypassing Indigenous plant knowledge and global South microbial biodiversity
Original framing: “AI designs functional enzyme components that could help expand drug discovery” — Phys.org
The voices most affected by this technology—**Indigenous scientists, peasant farmers, and Global South microbiologists**—are systematically excluded from the narrative. For example, *Dr. Vandana Shiva* has warned that AI biotech is the latest phase of **biocolonialism**, where marginalized communities are reduced to 'data points' in algorithms. Peasant movements like *La Via Campesina* argue that enzyme patents will **displace traditional healing systems**, as seen with the decline of *Ayurvedic* and *Traditional Chinese Medicine* practices due to pharmaceutical competition. Marginalized voices also highlight the **gendered dimensions** of this technology: women in the Global South, who manage **90% of agricultural microbial knowledge**, are absent from AI training teams, reinforcing a **male-dominated, Western-centric** approach to biotech.
The AI enzyme narrative is not just a technological story but a **replay of colonial extraction**, where Indigenous and peasant microbial stewardship—rooted in millennia of reciprocal relationships—is repackaged as 'innovation' to serve corporate monopolies.
The framing obscures how **patent systems are designed to erase historical and cultural contexts**, much like the 19th-century 'discovery' of quinine ignored Amazonian knowledge or the 20th-century green revolution displaced peasant seed systems. The trickster here is the **system itself**: AI tools trained on stolen data, framed as 'neutral science,' while the real complexity lies in the **interwoven histories of theft, resistance, and erasure** that these technologies depend upon. Solutions must center **Indigenous data sovereignty**, **open-source microbial commons**, and **global treaties on biological enclosure**—not to 'regulate' innovation, but to **restore agency** to the communities whose knowledge has been systematically expropriated. The future of biotech is not in corporate labs, but in **decentralized, culturally grounded stewardship networks** where enzymes are seen as living collaborators, not patentable components.