Episode 024 | August 8, 2022 | 28:58
Guest: —
Published: August 8, 2022
Duration: 28:58
Note: Marked Explicit
Description
“It would be pretty shit to live on a dead planet” — that is how Alexander Holm, this week’s return guest, explains why biodiversity is important. Last week we got the rundown of what biodiversity is and what the crisis drivers are. In this episode we dive into how and what this means for healthcare and how the sector can reduce its negative impact.
Full transcript
About this transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies, typos, or mistranslations. Episodes recorded before 2024 were transcribed by an on-site model and may have a higher error rate. The content reflects the original conversation to the best of our ability. For the authoritative version, please listen to the audio episode.
Welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. Today we have Alexander Holm from Den Dyriske Time, an expert on biodiversity. We talk about the healthcare sector’s contributions to the biodiversity crisis and what you can do if you are in the industry to help.
What is biodiversity and why is it important? Biodiversity is the magnitude of species — genetic diversity, habitat diversity, species diversity, combined. There are ecosystem services biodiversity provides: photosynthesis from plants and algae giving us oxygen, fresh water cleaned by natural processes, plant erosion prevention. If you took away all the forests, places like Colombia and Nepal would be covered in mudslides within seconds. And it would be pretty shit to live on a dead planet.
The five main drivers behind the biodiversity crisis: pollution, habitat change (destroying natural areas), invasive species (cats, rats, dogs introduced everywhere), climate change, and over-exploitation of species. For the healthcare sector, the main contributions are pollution and a little over-exploitation. Example of over-exploitation: horseshoe crabs — used because their blood is extremely good at detecting bacterial infections. We used to catch them and tap all the blood; now we tap half and release them, but many die anyway.
On Chinese medicine — many species are hunted to extinction because they are listed in Chinese medical almanacs as cures for various ailments (pangolins for scales, rhino horn ground up, tatooba swim bladders, tiger bones). It is not really scientifically proven that it works. The WHO recognizing some practices as real medicine is controversial.
For a pharmaceutical company doing fermentation-based API production — your first material concern should be strategic sourcing. What sugar are you feeding the yeast? If it is Danish root sugar from beets, fine — we are not cutting down nature in Denmark because we do not have any. But cane sugar from deforestation is a problem. Questions to ask suppliers: are we actively contributing to deforestation? Are we contributing to pollution with inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides?
On birth control and pharmaceutical pollution — a lot of birth-control compounds come out in urine and are not properly cleaned, ending up in streams and lakes. You can measure it in trout in Europe — the hormones affect them. Same with antibiotics in bears in Sweden — some have developed antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Same with paracetamol and opiates in water. The medicinal industry needs to make these compounds. You could ask them to make compounds that are more easily degradable, but it has a very long time to market — typically several years up to ten through clinical trials. The fastest are five to seven years.
The COVID vaccine was developed incredibly fast. A solid part of the explanation: it is incredibly difficult to recruit a patient group large enough for clinical trials. With COVID, everyone on the planet was a potential patient. The main reason new drugs do not reach market is not safety — it is patient recruitment. When developing a blockbuster drug applicable to most people, recruitment is much easier.
One more thing — and this is controversial — the medicinal industry has a lot of money. They could use some of it to care for biodiversity. Buy natural areas. Take a company like Novo Nordisk — they have thousands of kroner. If they used some to buy up natural areas and say “this is Novo protected land”, they could indirectly upgrade human health by upgrading the health of the planet. This is me, a biologist and a hippie, thinking out loud.
On biomimicry: for you to mimic something you need to observe it. By having species go extinct we are limiting the field of solutions to learn from. The scorpion tail incorporates metal — biological organism takes minerals and grows metal inside a carbon-based life form. That is incredibly efficient for puncturing skin — relevant to needle manufacturing. We could imagine growing needles organically in a lab. We have grown spider web in goat tits — feeding silk-producing cells into mammary glands so the goat produces spider-web silk through milk. It came out as weird liquid, but the principle is there.
Many active medical molecules — paracetamol for example — were first stumbled upon in nature. As we cut down rainforest, we lose potential medicines. The Amazon has 150,000-180,000 species of plants already discovered, probably many more undiscovered. Who knows how many have molecules we could use? Conserving those areas might actually be good for the medicinal industries.
Thank you Alexander. For Danish-speaking listeners — please take a listen to Den Dyriske Time. Thanks for listening to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. Please rate and share.