Source: Fortune.com
Summary
Basecamp Research, a UK-based biotech company, has launched the “Trillion Gene Atlas” project, aiming to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. The project, developed in collaboration with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics, PacBio, and Nvidia, aims to expand our knowledge of genetic diversity 100-fold by collecting genomic data from over 100 million species across thousands of sites worldwide. The company has raised $85 million in venture capital and is comparing this initiative to the Human Genome Project.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
Basecamp Research is taking a bet on building an “internet of biology” for AI models to train on. The company has faced criticism for potentially echoing a modern form of colonialism, extracting value from communities without adequately sharing it. Basecamp has started paying royalties to countries and communities for their data, attempting to trace the origin of each data sample and measure its contribution to downstream outputs.
The strategy enters a familiar phase: data is a trade-off, and what we are willing to give depends on what we hope to gain.
Author: Evan Null
