ABSTRACT
Prior informed consent (PIC) has become an important tool in mechanisms that regulate the use and access to biological diversity and that implement the rights of such stakeholders as the nation state and indigenous and local communities over these resources. As critically important as PIC is to self-determination and to equitable models of exchange between researchers and research subjects or participants, we can immediately anticipate several difficulties in its implementation. These difficulties, in turn, emerge from the socio-economic, cultural and political reality in which most research initiatives are embedded.6 For one thing, researchers can not realistically foresee all the potential risks and implications of their research, firstly, because cause-effect relations are extremely complex and, secondly, because the technological, social, political and economic circumstances that determine the consequences of research – particularly of published research – will inevitably change in unpredictable ways (see Chapter 4). Biotechnology, information technology, the global economy and the privatization of science, for example, have all had a tremendous impact on how genetic resources and ethnobotanical information are valued, used or misused, and has done so in ways that were hardly foreseeable to our colleagues several decades ago (see Chapter 1). Some of the unforeseeable conse-
quences of research may thus ultimately prove to be the most important ones.
