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London\u2019s Natural History Museum has been called \u201cNature\u2019s Treasurehouse<\/a>\u201d. Crammed with more than 80mn objects, the 272-year-old collection contains everything from a skeleton of Sophie the Stegosaurus to 12.5mn pinned specimens of butterflies and moths. But this rich trove is busy turning itself into a global digital resource that could open up new pathways for scientific research in our artificial intelligence age.<\/p>\n As he whizzes through the Jurassic gardens, the NHM\u2019s director Doug Gurr enthuses about the possibilities of using the museum\u2019s collections to deepen our understanding of the natural world and the effects of climate change. For example, researchers are currently studying specimens of Arctic krill, which probably constitute the world\u2019s largest wild biomass, that were collected during the Scott and Shackleton expeditions more than a century ago. \u201cWe are now going back to the same locations and seeing how things are changing today,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n As a former head of Amazon UK, Gurr is immersed in technology and is building a specialist AI team within the museum to act as a public good. The team is using pattern recognition software to help the UK Border Force identify endangered animal skins and translate museum texts into speech to assist visually impaired visitors.<\/p>\n But the NHM is also painstakingly digitising its collection one specimen at a time, creating an machine-readable scientific database.<\/p>\n Compendious as the NHM\u2019s collections are, they contain only a minute fraction of nature\u2019s data. The vast majority of the planet\u2019s lifeforms are single-cell organisms that have yet to be recorded. If all the species equated to the scale of the Atlantic Ocean then we have sequenced the genomes of just five drops of water, says Glen Gowers, co-founder of Basecamp Research, a London-based start-up. Progress in biology remains a prodigious data challenge.<\/p>\n Basecamp \u2014 motto: beyond known biology<\/a> \u2014 is in the business of sequencing<\/a> as many species as it can. By better understanding the language of evolution, pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical companies should then be able to create better products for consumers.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s database currently contains more than 10bn genes across 400 terabases of genetic data, but it is steadily expanding with every exploratory expedition it mounts. It is already working in more than 20 countries, ranging from Costa Rica to Malawi and Malta.<\/p>\n How scientifically useful, or commercially valuable, such data sets may be is as yet hard to tell. Venture capital investors have lost a lot of money betting on start-ups aggregating different forms of data. For example, the genetic testing company 23andMe,<\/a> once valued at $5.8bn, was sold for just $256mn earlier this year.<\/p>\n Gowers accepts that data is not so valuable by itself. It is what you do with the information that counts. To that end, Basecamp has partnered with Nvidia and Microsoft to create its own AI foundation models to analyse and interrogate the internet of biology. \u201cWe\u2019re creating this digital twin of evolution and the natural world and allowing models to look into it,\u201d he tells me.<\/p>\n As ever with data, the question arises: who should benefit from its derivatives? Some countries in the global south have been scarred by the \u201cbiopiracy\u201d of the global north. In the late 20th century, controversies arose<\/a> around western companies developing valuable pesticides, dietary products and blood pressure drugs based on native plants from India and southern Africa and venom taken from Brazilian vipers. However, Basecamp runs its own benefit-sharing programme supporting local partners and paying out 1 per cent of the revenues it generates from its data, exceeding international protocols.<\/p>\n