The star in this story is Thermus Aquaticus — referred to more dashingly as Taqs — that was found in Yellowstone in 1966 by Thomas Brock, a scientist from Indiana University, and Hudson Freeze, an undergraduate student. The two isolated a strain from the bacterium, wrote a paper about it and deposited the Taqs cultures in the American Type Culture Collection in Washington.

This was a major breakthrough because it proved that micro-organisms could live at much higher temperatures than were thought possible and led to research nearly two decades later that resulted in the Nobel Prize-winning process called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. The PCR process using an enzyme from Taqs, was invented by Kary Mullis, a researcher for the Cetus Corporation, was a blockbuster: it helped to speed up the replication of DNA and is used in a variety of industrial and medical processes.

This is where the story takes an interesting turn. The American research outfit Cetus Corporation got the sample of Taqs for just $35 but it sold the patent for the PCR process to the Swiss pharma giant Hoffman-La Roche for a reported $300 million in 1991. According to a study by Robert Lindstrom, annual sales of PCR equipment and supplies based on Taqs are estimated to be approximately $200 million and are growing because of more diverse applications.

Yellowstone National Park got nothing for Taqs.

It was in the mid-90s that the park decided it had to be compensated monetarily for its rich bio-reserves which contain an estimated 60 per cent of the world's geothermal features. A wide array of bacteria grow in the hot springs, geysers, fumaroles, and boiling mud pots of Yellowstone's geothermal ecosystem. The enzymes in these organisms, which can function in environments in which most living organisms would be destroyed, are of huge interest to companies developing products that operate in similar conditions.

Yellowstone put together a pilot benefit-sharing agreement that would help it secure it monetary gains from any research spin-off while boosting conservation. It used the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements or CRADAs that enabled federal laboratories in the US to get money from private companies for use of their resources. A pathbreaking CRADA was signed in 1977 with Diversa Corporation in the first attempt by a national park to derive some benefits from the commercialisation of research conducted on material sourced from it.

Preston Scott of the World Foundation for Environmental Development, who was recently in Delhi arguing the case for such agreements, says: "If we give nothing, we get nothing." Although the likelihood of another blockbuster like the PCR is remote, the chances of getting returns from R&D are high, he claims. He points out that around 45 inventions based on material originally sourced from Yellowstone have been patented since 1976; none of this has brought dividend to the park.

What Scott did not elaborate on was the opposition that Yellowstone encountered. Several lawsuits were filed against the Diversa pact, some of which forced the company to significantly increase the payments to Yellowstone and to alter the wording of the agreements. Other lawsuits calling for greater transparency in such agreements are still to be settled. Critics say they are against the "selling off public resources". Beth Burrows, director of the Edmonds Institute, a non-profit dealing with environment, technology and intellectual property rights, believes "the product is something that belongs to the people of this nation" and there should be no commercial deals over public property.

There are lessons in this for India, which boasts a treasure trove of biological material. But the country appears to be banking on a new global compact to protect nations against such misappropriation. With the backing of more than half of the WTO members, India along with Brazil and Peru, has proposed an amendment to the agreement on TRIPS that would require patent applicants to specify the origin of genetic material and traditional knowledge in the application so that countries are better protected against biopiracy or misappropriation. The proposed amendment is aimed at harmonising the rules between TRIPS and CBD. It is not certain, however, that this will turn out to be a foolproof system.